


A Nasty Piece of Work

by Anynameisfine



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Fear, Feminist Themes, Meta, Much intriguing, Murder, POV Female Character, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-01-22 15:37:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 46,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12484980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anynameisfine/pseuds/Anynameisfine
Summary: There cannot be many people in their right mind who move to a place like Gotham to resolve their writer's block. Yet, she left her harmonic hometown and decided to seek inspiration and happiness in the gloomy streets of the city. She never wanted to get involved with bad people. She never wanted to get swallowed up by this metropolis.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note: I do not own Gotham.  
> This is my first fanfiction, so I'd really appreciate your feedback.

It was unusually cold for this time of the year, and frankly, things have been unusual for her lately, too. Rubbing her hands together and breathing onto the cold, pink skin in front of her face did not do her much good. The fact that she wore only a sweater instead of a jacket did not improve things much. She could feel the cold in her bones and could barely master up the energy to quicken her step to get home quicker and perhaps warm up due to the slight exercise.

  
Once she got home, she would turn the heating on, treat herself to a hot shower and look for this one pair of woolen socks she owned- which were a friend’s first attempt to knitting something and looked awfully in both colour and form. She wore them with pride- in the confides of her home. She would also treat herself to a canned tomato soup. This was not so much a treat as the result of being broke. Moving into this city, paying a ridiculously high rent for a small apartment, and trying not to starve have most definitely taught her how to better organize her finances.

  
After three awkward job interviews in the cause of 4 days, she was invited for a trial working day at a café. Not being too experienced in that field, her feet hurt from walking and her mouth hurt from smiling for 8 hours straight. It was moments like this that made her curse having studied humanities and not economics. The literature degree might have been fun to obtain and surely her parents had been very proud of her, but it most definitely wasn’t to helpful at interviews. She wanted to be an author and write children’s novels, maybe taking an art class or two and learn how to illustrate them.

  
Stories about friendship, adventures, obstacles, laughter, and tears. Stories that would entertain, reassure, and comfort young people. Stories with a morale, a smart twist, and vast grey zones. Sitting in coffee houses, drinking Chai Lattes, skipping between watching people and getting absorbed into a world that she was creating, that was the life she had been dreaming of.

  
It was not like the writing-thing was not working at all, she had just been… stuck. Nothing but accusingly white pages for ages. No talks with parents, no walks with pets, no going out with friends would help. She would spend nights, staring at the ceiling, and seek distraction during her days. She bought a fluffier pillow. Then a harder one. It took her almost 4 months and more pillow purchases than she is proud of to realize that something needed to change. She decided to leave her small town and move into a bigger city that was pulsating with life and home of so many people with so many different stories that she would never tire of listening to them. If she could not write fiction for children, then maybe she could write about the life of real people.

  
If she had nothing to say, then maybe she could start listening instead.  
She was not the first person to have a blog, and it surely wasn’t as cool to have one anymore as it had been back when she was in school, but she considered it a good idea to tackle her… writer’s block. Furthermore, it seemed like a really good idea to get to know people and a reason to leave her crappy apartment. Her first idea was to find people who differ tremendously from each other in terms of their occupation and lifestyle and ask them a total of 20 short questions and see where they give similar and different answers. It was not the most original idea in the world, but she hoped it would turn out as a nice little project that could give her the inspiration she needed to continue with her novel.

  
Six weeks ago, she had arrived in this city, and given herself more than enough time to settle in. Her furniture was up and standing, her clothes were put in her closet and her books on the shelves. She had only one blog entry and officially run out of excuses. The next month would be more than tight if she did not get a job. It was about time that she started looking for an occupation, especially if she was to look at her bank account which had be somewhat inconsolable after she had transferred the deposit to her landlord.

  
Once she got home, she felt utterly relieved when the heating went on right away and the water in the shower only took a minute to get warm. With a cup of tea and a can of tomato soup, she settled down in front of her old laptop, waiting patiently for it to come to life. Can I pretend to be a hipster when my computer is ten years old? Or does it only work with mobile phones? It was only an eternity later that she opened her blog and looked at the only single entry she had written so far. It was about an old lady she had found sitting alone in a café down the street.

>   
>  _Do you enjoy living in this city?_  
>  _Sometimes I feel like things are changing too fast for me. Back in my days, it was easier to keep track of this city. I knew my neighbours and they knew me, and we would do each other favours, help each other out. Gotham was always big and loud, but once you were surrounded by loved ones, you would just go into the park and spend some hours in the sun, my husband was always talking, always telling funny stories, and embarrassing our children. Now, my husband is gone, my children are working all the time, I don’t know my neighbours, and they shut down the park and put another grey building with lots of glass where it used to be. Some days, I don’t even remember what it used to look like. I could never forget the smell of the grass and the sound of our laughter. I would never want to leave, all my happy memories are here, I don’t think I could ever sleep without the noise of the city. (Laura, 82)_

  
It had been naïve of her to think that she would be able to write only one or two pages for each person while asking them 20 questions. During her talk with the old lady, she decided to only pick three of the questions she had made up and asked her about the job she used to have before becoming a pensioner and what she would change if she had one wish.

>   
>  _I wish that things would slow down for just one more day and people would stop for a second and care a little bit more about each other. I don’t have any regrets, I have had and done everything I wanted, but it would be so nice to trust strangers again…_

  
Thinking of the lady made her feel happy and sad at the same time. She decided to show her face again at the café once she had a job and could afford a cup of coffee without feeling decadent. It would be nice to show the lady that she had not forgotten her after their conversation, that she would take time and be a nice stranger.

  
Her blog entry had a total of three hits. Shame. She closed the website and opened the document that she had started to dread. 150 pages. Some chapters, some paragraphs, some just basic ideas. But it was just not right. She skimmed over her work and contemplated what to do. She had grown attached to her characters and their backstories. She could not delete it and start over, but she also could not ignore one tiny little problem: There was just no plot. She closed the document again and lurched into the bathroom to get her toothbrush. She was halfway there when her phone vibrated.

>   
>  _Dear Miss Brent, we hope you enjoyed your day at our café and would like to offer you a job as a waitress. Please let us know if you are interested by tomorrow afternoon. We look forward to hearing from you! - Arthur Phelps_

  
She would go and get that coffee with the old lady. And some real food. Maybe pasta. Or, dear lord, vegetables. Maybe even a new pair of socks.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The protagonist gets a name and meets some interesting people.

>   _If there was one thing you could tell the whole world, what would that be?_
> 
> _Y’all should be nicer to each other, it doesn’t cost a damn thing. (Nathan, 20)_

She had grown fond of this city, she didn’t mind the awful weather and the dark, almost intimidating buildings. Somehow, the anonymity of it all freed her, the polluted air let her breath freely, the traffic noise let her sleep soundly, and the heavy rain made her feel cozy when she watched the little drops hitting her window. The people seemed more interesting than in her hometown, perhaps because everything was so new to her, or perhaps because everyone on the streets was always in a hurry, going on busily about their life, and distrustful of strangers. Their suspiciousness made them even more interesting for her- why were they so secretive and distant? What stories would they have to tell?

In the beginning of her project, she had only interviewed people who seemed at ease in what everyone would consider a safe environment. Now, she also introduced herself to strangers on public transport, or asked people on the street. The young man she had last spoken to was probably right: People around here weren’t too nice unless you got close to them.

Some more weeks had passed and she had settled in quite well at her new job. The café was neither posh nor run down and attracted a vast variety of customers. It did not take her long to get to know the regulars and to engage them into her project. All in all, she felt comfortable working here, and was blessed with friendly colleagues that would teach her how to transport several cups of hot drinks without spelling one single drop.

One evening, about an hour before the café would close, she was alone with another waitress and only enjoyed the lazy atmosphere that always settled in when only a few customers were in. Her colleague, Gina, was a vibrant personality and always in a good mood. While she herself would sometimes forget to smile and had to remind herself to look friendly even when not directly talking to customers, Gina was always smiling, unconsciously tapping her feet, and humming a melody.  
The shifts with Gina were here favourite, not only was her happiness contagious, she would also ask random questions from time to time which would interrupt her colleagues’ thoughts.

“Hey Sophie, can you think of a paradox right now?”

It was impossible for her to tell whether or not Gina’s questions were hinting or aiming at something or where they came from, but they were refreshing and Gina had never been discontent with any answer she had received so far. “Um, maybe a stone arch?”. Gina blinked. “What do you mean?”- “Well, it doesn’t collapse despite being crooked. Like, its stones should collapse and the arch should fall, but in fact that’s what makes it stand.” Gina grinned, “that’s a nice paradox”, and went back to work.

During their conversation, none of them had seen the three men wearing suits entering the building. They had settled down on one of the more remote tables and appeared to not be talking to each other at all. Sophie glimpsed at Gina and saw that she was busy with the dishwasher, whistling softly to herself, and started moving.

 _Enjoying the silence, huh_ , Sophie thought, as she approached the table and apologized to the men for not getting to them earlier. While she was wearing her best smile, the change in the café’s atmosphere was not unnoticed by her. Somehow, these men wouldn’t fit into this place. Their clothes were a bit too well-fitted, their watches a bit too big and the air around them a bit too cold. She inwardly scolded herself for assuming they would be criminals. Being rich was most definitely not a crime.  
  
_I’m probably just envious and judgy._ Yet, the thought that they could be outlaws thrilled her. Both her superficial assumptions and the aura of the men intrigued her. What would they answer to her blog questions and how much above wasting their time with that kind of thing would they feel? Each one of them wanted a glass of water. None of them men had reciprocated her smiley or said thank you once. Sophie was getting nervous. Something was not right.

She had never been superstitious, in fact, most people would call her particularly down-to-earth for some who spends most of their time with their nose in a book and their mind in fictional worlds. However, she decided that it would be all right to listen to her gut feeling for once in a while. She gave the last two customers who had not hurried to leave already their bills and convinced Gina - who seemed to be oblivious of how the atmosphere had changed – to take a smoke break. As Sophie knew, Gina’s smoke breaks could take a while and she sometimes wondered about the peculiar smell that emitted from her clothes afterwards.

It would have been smart for her to leave as well. Maybe she should have joined Gina and finally started smoking (whatever it was her colleague was smoking). But a mixture of curiosity and the feeling of responsibility made her stay. Sophie made sure to keep herself in the back corner of the room, close to the back door and almost invisible. She waited for a couple of minutes that felt like hours, feeling her heart in her chest, her pulse resonating between her ears and her teeth. She did not feel safe. She felt exposed and she was scared.

Finally, a man entered the café and became the centre of attention for Sophie and the three men. It was not that he had a spring in his step, but his gait seemed to display a peculiar cheerful energy. He was much different to her other customers, but she could not quite pinpoint in which way exactly. It was a bit silly, in fact, that four people’s attention was fully caught up by one guy crossing a room, one the other hand, it would be hard to blame then.

He was bald, tall, and rather intimidating to them. Like the men, he wore well-fitted, sharp clothes, but his seemed to be intended to serve a practical sense, as he wore heavy boots and, Sophie gulped, guns strapped to his torso. When he was in line with Sophie, she heard him speak for the first time: “You should leave.”. He did neither stop or look at her, but she knew that she was the one addressed. The tone of his voice might have indicated a kind suggestion or perhaps a slightly humorous scolding, but Sophie took it as a command. She quietly left her corner and almost tiptoed out of through the backdoor, hearing the entrance door opening once again.

Outside, she found Gina who was easily convinced that their shift was over and Sophie had gone through the closing procedure already. As Gina went home, Sophie remembered her obligation to count today’s earnings, put up the chairs, and clean the whole place. There was no way, she would go back inside anytime soon, it was likely that she had left a sinking ship. Should she call her boss? He would probably inform the police and, whatever was happening inside, all of the four men had seen her and she did not want them to think that she had gotten them into trouble.

 _You are probably overreacting. Maybe, there is nothing too bad happening in there and you should just come back and check the place in a couple of hours. There won’t be any corpses, your life is not like these thrillers you like to read so much._ She took a deep breath and decided to go home for now. Her jacket was still inside, but she did not even feel the cold when she walked down the dark streets which had just become slightly more threatening.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie gets up early.

Sophie had spent the last night dreaming about the four men that came to her work place the evening before and felt in no way refreshed or well rested. When she woke up for the third time, it was still dark outside, but she still forced herself to crawl out of bed. She turned the TV on and switched to the news while fixing herself a much- needed cup of coffee.

In a city like Gotham, news about crime could get quite extensive, so she only listened half-heartedly to the TV while fixing herself a modest breakfast that only included toast and butter and contemplated how much longer she could postpone her grocery shopping. The news reporter said something about two people being killed in an alley which reminded her of how little attention she had paid to her surroundings on her way home last night. She should definitely be more careful. Her sense of safety was a bit shaken by yesterday’s events, although nothing had really happened to her.

The early shift of the café would arrive in approximately three hours, that would be enough time to take care of her missed deeds. And perhaps to discover a body. Or three. The city which never slept appeared to be lazier at this time of the day- the people who had been clubbing all night were finally at the end of their stamina and stumbled home, while the people working early clung to their coffee cups and stumbled to their jobs. Things went slower and everyone seemed more vulnerable. Perhaps she should find the lady from her first blog entry and ask her to take an early walk with her one day.

Her hands trembled when they touched the material of the opening door and she stopped breathing as she applied pressure to the wood. Pressure which did not make it move an inch. With her pulse hammering in her ears, Sophie felt more alert than ever and quickly fumbled the keys out of her pocket. She unlocked the door, entered her workplace, turned on the lights, and saw… nothing. Everything looked normal, even better than usual. Not only were the chairs placed on top of the tables, but also was the floor sparkling clean. Sophie went to the till and opened it, it looked just as full as the night before. She let out a relieved sigh and started counting the money. Not a single penny was missing.

Back home, Sophie picked up her blanket from the bed and moved herself onto the sofa. After leaving the café, she had wondered if her mind might have played tricks on her. Maybe she was a weird one, so desperate for something exciting to happen, that she would hallucinate about it. Or she could have accidentally inhaled a puff of Gina’s special cigarettes. The alternative would be frightening. There had to be a reason why they had left the place in a better condition than it was before. _Why did they have to clean up?_ She turned on the TV to distract her from her thoughts until she got a text from Gina:

> _Hey Sophie, did you go on some kind of cleaning spree last night? I swear, the boss was head over heels when he saw that you even took care of the freaking freezer. :D Maybe, he’ll make you employee of the month! Xx, Gina_

Maybe she should feel grateful, because they made her look like a hardworking newbie. There was no way she would tell her boss about how four men met in his coffee place and decided to clean it meticulously.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie leaves work early again.

There hadn’t been any more weird occurrences and Sophie found herself slowly relaxing and settling back into her routine. She still shared most of her shifts with Gina, but also got to know some of her other colleagues better. They sometimes went out for drinks in a bar and then moved on to a club, having another person decide the location each time.

Sophie had never particularly enjoyed going clubbing. Just the process of getting ready for a night out seemed tiresome to her. It would take her forever to apply her make-up in a decent manner and the dresses she actually enjoyed wearing were usually plain, comfortable, and not revealing. Yet, her co-workers have found a way to get her into their favourite clubs “looking like a prude”, as they called it. She had somehow accidentally managed to get a social life – and she didn’t hate going out as much as she had anticipated.

She was aware that the did not turn into a more sociable human being by coincidence, the dust that gathered on her computer and her notebooks proved that. But, heck, it was fun to let go from time to time and spend her time the people her age are apparently supposed to do.

Recently, Sophie had found herself adapting some of her peers’ off-handedness, and things like excessive smiling and pleasant small talk became more natural to her. She had never imagined that changing her environment would actually have an impact on her personality. Not that she had thought that her character was set in stone, she had just considered herself… steadier?

Nonetheless, her gained confidence and relaxed attitude made her feel safer in the streets of the metropolis again. She had not given much thought to the men who came to her workplace a couple of months ago and more or less dismissed the incident as a silly nightmare.

It was precisely three months later that Sophie would find herself once again in a similar situation. She was doing the late shift alone and in a particularly good mood as she had had pleasant conversations with interesting customers and even took some notes for her blog during her break. Perhaps that was why the shift of the room’s atmosphere hit her even harder than the last time. She felt the little hairs on her arms rising the minute the door was opened, a coldness creeping into the warm and inviting room. Within seconds, the door fell shut, but the air remained chilly and so did the goose bumps on her skin.

Awe-stricken, her eyes followed the suited figures that had entered the café and quickly realized that those were not the same men that had come the last time. Yet, they made her equally nervous -  and her customers, too, apparently. Not two minutes after the men had arrived, all her customers had either come to her to pay or simply left their money on the table.

Sophie was alone with the men and forced herself to take a deep breath before making her way to their table and doing her job. In contrast to the last customers she had perceived as threatening, these one actually paid attention to her, increasing her uneasiness. She felt four pairs of eyes watching her every move and also roaming over her body. _Uh-oh._

“Well, what a pretty waitress we got here, boys! Could you get us four cappuccinos, sweetheart?” She hurried to the coffee machine and tried to catch parts of their conversation. The machine drowned most of the words out, but Sophie got the general idea that the man who had given her the order was most likely in charge of the group as he seemed to be intently telling these men something.

“Would you like to sit with us, darling?” the man inquired as she brought them their drinks. “Oh, that is too kind of you, sir, I really appreciate the offer, but unfortunately, I am not allowed to sit with customers during my shift.”- “You’re a virtuous one, eh? How about after your shift then?” the man grinned. “I am awfully sorry, sir, but I have a date with my boyfriend later tonight” she lied shamelessly. She saw his eyes narrowing and felt her stomach drop. _Perhaps playing the ‘I have a boyfriend’-card wasn’t the best idea._

The man opened his mouth to speak and then paused with his lips parted like a fish, staring at a point behind Sophie. “How about you go and play with your boyfriend then?” a familiar voice suggested from behind her, making her jump. About 120 degrees behind her stood the bold man, nonchalantly eating one of the café’s cookies. It was a bizarre image that did in no way diffuse any of the tension in the room.

Sophie could hear the four men shift nervously on their chairs and stared at the hairless figure munching a cookie. Usually, people looked happy while eating their baked goods, and in a way, he did too. The way he was leaning at the counter seemed mockingly relaxed and the way he was starting at the men was more than unnerving. 

There were several thoughts crossing Sophie’s mind rather quickly. First of all, there is something thoroughly wrong with this guy. Secondly, her four customers which had scared her were actually terrified of him. Thirdly, if anything terrible had happened the last time the bald man was here, he had gotten out of it unharmed and was probably the one having _caused_ it to happen. Fourthly, would anyone miss that cookie? Should she pay for it? And fifthly, she should get out of here.

The man’s eyes had fixed themselves on her blank face and he waited patiently as she made her way out of the room. She walked slowly, as if not to startle anyone, and felt barely in control of her legs. Once she opened the door, the cold hit her hard in the face and washed away her dizziness. Her jacket was still inside. With deliberate steps, she walked away from the store and started running as soon as she was around the corner.


	5. Chapter 5

Sophie’s attempts to sleep had been futile, it was like the adrenaline just wouldn’t get out of her system. After having stared at the ceiling for the better part of an hour with a racing heart, she had gotten up and fixed herself a cup of camomile tea and sat down on the couch cross-legged. Eventually, her nerves calmed down to some extent. She got her blanket out of her bedroom, turned the TV on and made sure to turn the volume down to a low background noise as she got into a foetal position and tried not to think about anything but breathing slowly.

When she woke up the next morning, she realized to her surprise that she had somehow managed to get more than eight hours of blissful, dreamless sleep. She also noticed that her muscles in her legs were aching from running all the way home and that she was not smelling too good either. It was too late for her to check up on the café before the early shift arrived, so she decided she could as well take a hot shower and simply hope for the best. 

After breakfast she felt like a human being again and her optimism was experiencing some kind of revival. She decided to leave her apartment, have a quick look at her workplace (just to make sure), interview some people for her blog, and maybe write a page or two for her novel. _Everything is going to be fine._

Besides the sore muscles in her legs, she almost skipped down the streets as she moved closer to her workplace. The sun was shining and the air so refreshingly cold that she could almost ignore the pollution. That was, until she breathed in an unusual smell. It smelled like a bonfire, but not the kind above which you could roast marshmallows, instead, it smelled… unhealthy.

Sophie covered her mouth with her scarf and finally stepped into the street of her café, only to freeze in shock. The place was burned down to the ground. Several police cars were parked around the scene and she could see people in uniforms guard the void that once was her work place. People were looking for something inside of the rubble and ashes. She could make out two of her co-workers and her boss from afar, talking to the police.

Instinctively, Sophie turned around and walked away from the crime scene. Almost in slow motion she made her way back home, her energy had left her, and she was feeling limp. On the other hand, anxiety had taken over her heart. She thought about the bald man and wondered what had happened last night. Did he burn the source of her income to the ground? Were the four men in the building? Or did something else happen? She – and apparently the GCPD, too – was sure that it had been no accident.

_Just because they were so intimidated by the bald man doesn’t mean that he is invincible. Maybe it’s his body they will pull out of the ashes._ She didn’t know why she cared so much. Normally, the only thing she should be concerned about was paying her bills. A nice person would also be concerned about their boss’s and colleagues’ future. But she was just so curious and intrigued.

A part of her hoped that the bald man was okay. Against all odds, she somehow felt kind of… grateful to him for telling her to leave before whatever happened took place. _I must be the only person on this planet who thinks that someone who probably burned down their workplace is noble._

At home, she did not have to wait long before the police called her, informed her about the fire and asked her to come down to the precinct. Once she had put down the phone, she tried to swallow the lump that had formed in her throat. She hadn’t considered that they would need the statement of the last employee that had been working in the café.

The thought of telling them about any of her latest customers did not seem like a good idea. Angering _people like them_ could be lethal. Lying to the authorities did not seem like a good idea either, what if they asked her if she had locked the door and then found something contradicting what she had said in the ashes? She did not want to become a suspect.

On second thought, staying alive was definitely her top priority. She would try her best to wriggle herself out of this without telling the truth, maybe she could even pry some information from the police


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie's having a little chat.

Someone had told her once that people who suffer from shock have trouble remembering details. She had decided to test this theory in the field as she made her way to the precinct.

Apparently, Gotham's executive power did not seem to suspect her of having done anything wrong. At least the man who had waved for her to sit down in front of his desk didn't seem too interested in anything she could have had to say. In addition, his breath smelled like alcohol while it was barely noon.   
Yet, it was hard for Sophie to  _not_ say anything, so she decided to babble gracelessly.  
"I was just so  _sure_ that I had locked the door, I have never forgotten to- ", until the police officer interrupted her, "Don't you worry about that, Miss, we actually found out that the doors were locked. Did you notice anything weird last night before you went home?".   
Sophie pretended to think. "Uhm, no, everything was peaceful and quiet." – "Any conspicuous customers? Or new faces on your way home?" – "No, sorry. I mean, we get a lot of different customers, so it's hard for me to remember them all. I am also quite new, so I still struggle with recognizing the regulars…", Sophie lied shamelessly, blushing only slightly. "I see", the officer answered, "if you can think of anything else, don't hesitate to give me a call". He handed her a card.

_Harvey Bullock_ , she read,  _Homicide Division_. Sophie suppressed a shiver. She just had to ask. "Did anyone get hurt, Detective Bullock?" He looked tired when he answered.

_They found four bodies. Did the bald guy kill the other men? Or did one of the four men manage to murder him after his companions died? What kind of business had been going on there? Was this about drugs? Why would anyone take care of their drug business in a coffee house?_

Sophie was glad that she had gotten off the hook so easily, but she could not stop thinking about last night and the incident before. A part of her felt guilty for being so intrigued by something as gloomy as a murder happening in her life. She should have been terrified and full of pity for the men who had died. She had never known anyone that died before. Maybe she was heartless.   
Heartless, but most definitely not fearless; her legs felt as wobbly as they had been when she left the café last night. And when a voice addressed her, she jumped.

"Hello, waitress.", Sophie froze, "Relax. I just want to talk. Let's take a walk", he chimed, his voice both cheerful and threatening. The bald man stood next to her and she had no idea where he had come from. After a couple of seconds, she became aware that staring at him might not be the best idea, so she mechanically set one foot in front of the other and started walking.

  
Sophie focused on breathing out, trying to calm herself down and then made an attempt to grasp her situation and the man walking next to her. She tried to subtly look at him, but was pretty sure that it didn't go by unnoticed. Her few glances had shown her that he wasn't only bald but completely hairless; he had not eyelashes or brows. Furthermore, he was tall and slim, and probably fast, so running wouldn't do her much good. And, most importantly, Sophie felt the colour leave her cheeks when she realized, he was armed.

He led the way until Sophie found herself in a more remote, quieter area of the city.  _Great_ , she thought. "Sooo", the man prolonged the vowel as he turned to her, "what's your name, waitress?". He almost hummed. Sophie remained silent as he looked intently into her eyes. As his gaze bore into hers, Sophie felt the fear leaving her bones and anger rising in her stomach. For the first time, she spoke to him.

"What do you want to talk about?", she asked with an even voice and stared back into his dark eyes. He started to grin at her. It was rather unnerving, but she refused to let the fear take over. She wanted to remain as much in control as possible.

"What did you tell the GCPD?", he asked, his grin gone so quickly that it was hard to believe it had been there in the first place. "I told them that I hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary during and after my shift" she said with a calm voice and felt a small twinge of pride for not panicking.

"Interesting." His voice suggested that he had never heard anything more boring in his entire life.

He intently examined her face and Sophie made sure to not let her gaze falter. "Alright. If you lied, little waitress, I will find out and we'll see each other again". He sounded as if this prospect was something he would very much look forward to and added an almost cheerful "Later!".

As Sophie watched him turn around, she couldn't stop herself from asking: "Why would you burn your evidence in the café? It makes no sense. Aren't there ways to… dispose of dead bodies that draw less attention?". She bit her tongue as he slowly turned around and chuckled.

"They weren't dead when the fire started", he stated happily before walking away.

It took Sophie some time to start moving after she had watched his silhouette disappear into a side street. The fear and anger she had felt just minutes ago had turned into numbness.

When she had gotten to her flat, she didn't even remember the route she had walked to get there. She had made herself a cup of tea that rested on the kitchen counter where it slowly got cold while she was staring out of the window. At some point, she turned on her computer, opened her least favorite document, and started writing.

How stupid of her not to realize earlier what her story had been missing all along.

Her story had needed a monster.

* * *

Author's Note: Ba Dum Tss.


	7. Chapter 7

 

> _After running for what felt like hours, the children finally made it back to the safety of their neighbourhood. Panting heavenly, they more or less collapsed onto the pavement. Joice’s thoroughly acquired self-respect wasn’t something that she could just turn off, and so she was the only one who made an effort to quiet down her breathing. She gracefully sat herself on the ground while Martin laid out flat on his back, his limbs stretched out, and panted loudly. Lisa was clutching her ribs and waited for the side stitches to pass, her eyes worriedly fixed on the road they had taken. It took her a moment before she could speak. “Do you think it followed us?”, she anxiously asked her companions. “Just because it saw us doesn’t mean, it’s going to follow us.”, David tried to reassure her to which Martin and Joice nodded briskly. They all very much wanted to believe that._

Sophie saved the document and let out a sigh of relief. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had written a single line for that story, but now she effortlessly added two chapters. She dared to have a look at the clock hanging on her wall and realized that she had spent almost 10 hours writing. Carefully, she stood up and flexed her back before making her way into the kitchen. She should definitely eat something.

It had been good to get all this down. After all, writing was her outlet and she had spent too much time stagnating. _Maybe I finally got to the point where I am so close to going crazy that I would have exploded if I hadn’t written anything_ , she mused.

She had yet to figure out a proper way to deal with everything that had happened in her coffee house and especially with the man who had more or less subtly threatened her.

While munching a hard slice of bread that she had unsuccessfully tried to soften with butter and jam, Sophie unfolded the newspaper. There was an article about the café which did not provide any new information.

With a sigh, she opened the page with the job ads and took the yellow marker that she had found in one of her drawers. She couldn’t afford to stay unemployed

 

* * *

 

> _What was your last big realization?_
> 
> _Everybody is just pretending to have their shit together. Oh, and my ex is an asshole. (Shannon, age unknown)_
> 
>  

The next morning, Sophie spent a couple of hours calling different potential employers and then decided to finally have a look at the texts she had received the day before and quickly set up a lunch date with Gina.

The address Gina had given her was definitely in the better area of town. Not that the coffeehouse of their former employer had been in a shady neighbourhood, but the streets that Sophie crossed were somewhat cleaner and the buildings appeared to be better maintained than what she was used to.

She hoped that the lunch she had agreed to have wouldn’t be overprized. Gina didn’t seem like the rich type. On the other hand, Sophie had never visited her colleague’s apartment or inquired how she could afford whatever she rolled her cigarettes with. She wasn’t even sure if the latter was particularly expensive.

Gina was standing in front of the restaurant with two steaming paper cups in her hands, and apparently fully immersed in a pleasant daydream. With a slight smile on her lips and her eyes fixed at nothing in particular, she only recognized Sophie when she stood right in front of her.

“You know, sometimes I wonder how you manage to not get run over by car when you zone out like that.”, Sophie grinningly scolded her friend.

“How dare you? I am a very attentive person!”, Gina replied, trying to keep a straight face and failing miserably.

“It’s good to see you, Gina! I am so glad that none of us was in there. I feel terrible for the people that died in the fire…”

Gina’s face sobered up. “I know, it’s awful. When Arthur called me, I didn’t believe it at first. I mean, I’ve worked there for years and the worst thing I’ve ever seen was a couple breaking up over some cheesecake. I cannot really imagine a murderer entering our café and ordering a cupcake.”

Sophie supressed a hysterical chuckle. “Exactly! How is the boss holding up, anyway?” Gina shoved one of the cups into her hand. “Arthur is in a bit of a shock, but he says that the insurance is gonna cover the whole thing, so at least he can rebuild the place.”

“That’s good to hear! Do you want to get lunch at this restaurant?”, Sophie gestured to the rather posh looking place to their right. Gina laughed. “Oh dear, no. This is my favour to you.”. She grinned happily. Sophie raised an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.” – “You see, this is my aunt’s place.” Sophie looked at her expectantly for a couple of second before saying: “Okay?” – “They are hiring! I wouldn’t wanna work at her place, because I couldn’t keep her from giving me special treatment, but I told her about you when she offered me a job”. She looked very pleased with herself.

“Oh wow, are you sure about this, Gina?” – “Yupp.” – “Thank you so much! But this restaurant looks rather high-class, what if I don’t - “, Gina interrupted her: “You’ll be perfectly fine, Sophie. If you want to, you can start this evening. Can we grab lunch now? I know a real cute place just five minutes away from here…”


	8. Chapter 8

Sophie couldn’t wait to get home. She desperately wanted to change into some comfier clothes and to wash the make-up from her face. The lipstick made her lips feel uncomfortably dry and the powder she had applied before her shift almost 8 hours ago was probably fully absorbed by her skin by now. Her black skirt wasn’t really elastic and her white blouse the exact opposite of comfortable.

In an unobserved moment, she managed to gracelessly wipe some sweat from her shiny forehead. It was her third day at _Canzuncella_ and it was freaking exhausting.

Gina’s favour had put her under more pressure than she had anticipated. When her friend’s aunt had told her about the hourly wage, her jaw had actually dropped (- which the middle-aged lady had politely ignored). Sophie hadn’t known that anyone payed their waiters that well.

Her co-workers seemed like robots to her as they moved from table to table, recited the menu, remembered their customers’ choices without writing them down and effortlessly carried several plates on both arms and a friendly smile on their faces. Would she ever be able to catch up to them?

Moreover, the customers intimidated her. No giggling students, no young mothers with their toddlers and no grumpy adorable old man ever set foot into this restaurant. Instead, Sophie was confronted with the high society of Gotham. Women with dresses that were both bold and fancy, men with tailormade suits. She had never seen so many guys in tuxedos.

She had felt self-conscious and clumsy all day and had really made an effort to keep her posture upright and to ban all abbreviations and everything that could be considered slang from her vocabulary. Now, she was just tired.

With a sigh, Sophie watched the big clockhand finally move to 12 and then lurched into the staff room as soon as the colleague who would do emerged from it. A look in the mirror told her that her mascara had smeared and that her face was shiny. With some tap water and her fingers, she managed to at least look like a human being again.

She grabbed her coat, wrapped her scarf around her neck and staggered into the cold. Once again, it was freezing cold outside. She added gloves and water-proof mascara to her mental shopping list.

Another downside of the job, besides the self-esteem issues it had arisen in her, was that her walk home was now much longer than before. Yet, if she would get tipped as well in the future as she had been in the last three days, she could theoretically afford to take a taxi to work every day and still pay her rent. _First world problems_ , she scolded herself.

Due to her movement in slow-motion, she hadn’t really come far when a fancy car stopped on the other side of the road and a familiar figure emerged from the driving seat. _Oh no,_ Sophie thought.

She pulled her hoodie deep into her face, tilted her head forward, in hopes that her scarf would conceal her face, and tried to speed up her walking.

Her efforts proved ineffectual. “Hi there!”, the bald man said in a loud voice, “new job, huh?”. Sophie resisted the urge to run and stopped to face her strange acquaintance. Instead of answering, she frowned at him. “I guess, the _Canzuncella_ is quite the improvement compared to your former work place. Congrats!”

Sophie didn’t know what to make of his tone. He didn’t sound friendly, it was more like he was subtly amused about a big joke that no one else would get. “Thanks, I guess”, she muttered, not daring to meet his eyes. This day had apparently not only eaten up her energy, but also her courage.

“Oh, no need to thank me”, he grinned. _His smile looks somewhat…sadistic_ , Sophie thought worriedly. “Erm”, she started, stealing a quick glance at his face before settling to look at his shoes instead, “are you planning to go there?” - “Yep.” – “for… dinner?”, she inquired anxiously. “For work”, he replied merrily. “Does your work always include burning places down?” she asked promptly and inwardly slapped herself. She had watched her mouth all day and now did not seem like the best time to let that slip. He chuckled darkly. Sophie felt a shiver creeping down her spine. “No, not necessarily”. She stopped looking at the floor and finally stared at him.

The clothes he wore looked posh, but what set him apart from the people whose tables Sophie had served all day were the guns strapped around his torso. He looked at her like she was utterly amusing to him. Besides the tension she felt in the air, Sophie took her chances and asked: “What exactly is it you are doing for work?”. Her questioned seemed to have taken him aback. “You must be new to Gotham”, he concluded, the menacing smile gone from his face. Sophie waited for him to elaborate, but he just said: “Nice chat, waitress. Sorry about your work place”, and turned to go.

Sophie couldn’t help but wonder which work place he was referring to and she was also sure that he was not sorry at all, so she bursted out: “How can you be sure that I won’t call the police and tell them that an armed man is about to enter the _Canzuncella_?”. The silence that followed offered enough time for the adrenaline and regret to kick in. _I’m dead_ , Sophie thought unceremoniously.

With silent steps, he came closer, invaded her personal space and threateningly bowed down to her until his face was only several inches away from hers. She felt his warm breath on her cold face and gulped. “You wouldn’t do that”, he stated as if she had just mockingly threatened a child to eat the last cookie, “you didn’t snitch the last time, so you won’t start now”.

After he had turned away to casually walk towards the restaurant, Sophie didn’t even reach for her phone. Instead, she buried her hands deep inside her pockets and finally went home to wash this day off her skin.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie needs a new job.

Apparently, the bald man had done his job properly. The attack on the _Canzuncella_ was all over the news: Seven people, including one policeman, were killed by an anonymous gunman and the place shut down temporarily.

Sophie stared at the TV screen and fed her bad conscience with chocolate. These people were dead because she had not called the police. She had failed to provide assistance, hadn’t she? She wondered if this made her a criminal already?  

Gina wasn’t answering her phone which left Sophie anxiously worrying that her aunt might have gotten hurt. The blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders did not stop her from trembling.

What had prevented her from snitching though? Was it fear? Misattributed loyalty? Did she stop caring about people dying? The last thought made her flinch. _I do care._

She laid down on the carpet and stared at the ceiling with one question occupying her mind:

_What is wrong with me?_

* * *

At some point, her inner pragmatist had taken over and she had started to function again. It wasn’t long until she had made herself presentable for another round of job interviews and left the house. She was tired of waiting tables and craved an occupation that was more…quiet.

The middle-aged librarian’s handshake was as warm as his smile and when Sophie left, she felt a genuine smile spread on her face. He had said that he would call her by the end of the week to inform her if she got the job. Sophie felt like she had made a good impression and dwelled on the idea of being surrounded by books all day. She would like that. 

Her optimism lasted until she made a right turn and saw the man who anonymously dominated the news. She looked around. It was broad daylight, there were a lot of people, and she had enough anger bottled up to fuel her courage.

Full of determination, she walked up to the figure who was leaning against the wall and apparently observing his surroundings intently, a slight frown on his face. He did not look at her, but Sophie was sure that he had seen her from the moment she left the library. _Or maybe even before that. What if he’s stalking me?_ She decided to better not think about that.

 “No offence, but, are you planning to ruin another occupational opportunity for me?”, she greeted him and watched his lips twitch into a half-grin. Instead of answering, he looked at her face thoughtfully before he reached into his jacket. Sophie felt her heart skip a beat. _If he is ruthless enough to kill people in restaurants, why would he hesitate to shoot me on the street?_ But instead of a gun, he produced a pen and a small note pad on which he wrote something.

“In fact, I’ve got another occupational opportunity for you”, he said and held out the note to her. Sophie stared at him with wide eyes. “In your…um, metier?”, she asked astonished. He raised his hairless eyebrows. “In a club.”, he said dryly and put the note into her hands.

With the motion, his pale hand brushed against hers and she immediately flinched away. While cursing her poor impulse control, Sophie at least managed to supress the urge of rubbing the skin that he had touched. His skin had felt dry, yet somewhat smooth. _Like the hand of a normal person,_ she thought. She had somehow assumed that a murderer’s hands would feel cold, rough, and violent.

Her reaction seemed to amuse him. With a smirk on his face, he continued to speak. “He pays good money.”

“Who?”, Sophie asked. Maybe this was her choice to find out who sent this man to cause so much death and destruction. He gallantly ignored her question, his attention caught by something or someone he could watch by peering over her shoulder. “Don’t turn around”, he ordered in an unexcited tone. “If you want the job, just go to the address and talk to the boss. Gotta go.” And with this, he vanished into a side alley.

Sophie looked at the piece of paper he had handed her. The place was called _Oswald’s_ and most definitely not on the list of clubs that her friends had dragged her to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: I just quickly wanted to thank you guys for the Kudos and your kind words in the comments! They make very happy. :)


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie makes a decision.

She rested the piece of paper against an empty cup of tea that had been left abandoned on her kitchen table. It looked like a poor imitation of the picture of a greeting card leaned against a vase filled with an expensive flower bouquet. Sophie tried to imagine how her mother would react if she ever walked into her flat and saw her poor décor.

The place that her murderous acquaintance had recommended to her seemed to be in one of the better areas of town. Coincidentally, Sophie was pretty fed up with those "better areas". She liked to call the rather run-down part of the metropolis where she resided her home. It seemed to her that this was her niche, the place where she fitted in. Being surrounded by classy buildings and classy people made her feel uneasy.

Another thing that made her feel uneasy was encountering criminals. Whoever the strange man's boss might be, Sophie was sure that he would be trouble. She didn't really need to even contemplate on taking the job. It was not an option. She wasn't one to play with fire.

Yet, she couldn't keep her eyes from wandering towards the note. It was like the more she tried to distract herself from even thinking about it, the more it dominated her mind. While prepping dinner, while reading a book, while watching TV, it remained in the back of her head, easily absorbing her attention

Eventually, she gave up, rose from her couch, went into the kitchen, and sat in front of the note again -  _like a crazy person_ , she told herself. Besides the mystery of what she might discover if she indulged her curiosity and actually applied for a job in this club, there was also something else that drew her to the note which she hadn't realized before.

The handwriting of this murderer did not cover expectations. She would have anticipated it to be either extremely simple, aggressive scribble that displays a lack of patience, time, and care for such mundane things as writing. Or to be a calligraphic masterpiece that she somehow associated with psychopaths.

She had been wrong. Just like the brief touch of his skin against hers had indicated that he was, after all, just made of flesh and blood, his handwriting was 'normal', too. It was neither very orderly or messy and if she hadn't known that it was his, she wouldn't have given it a second glance, let alone thought.

Sophie was unhealthily curious about the man, she found herself equally frightened and intrigued by him. Her initial approach, the easy approach, to label him as a monster, did not suffice to satisfy her. After all, she was convinced that every human being held a manifoldness of personal experience, character traits, and unmatched complexity in store.

When someone is being confronted with a monster, running away is probably the only good option. But Sophie didn't believe in monsters. And meeting someone who has something monstrous about them, was far too fascinating for her to even turn away.

She would love to do him justice, to uncover his identity and background, to understand how someone could do the things he does.

And she couldn't see herself achieving that without getting her fingers at least slightly dirty


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie goes out.

 

> _Joice hadn't told anyone about yesterday's peculiar incident. She knew that her friends would not understand. Lisa has had nightmares for weeks after they fled from it and even Martin, who would never admit to being scared of anything, had come to school with dark circles under his eyes. All of them had been tense, unfocused and easily irritated. Only when the change of seasons had introduced longer days and warm rays of sunshine that tingled their noses, they had started to forget. Joice wouldn't want to ruin that for them, after all, she was good at keeping secrets._

* * *

Finally, Gina had texted her back and assured her that her aunt was fine, except for the shock, of course, and that none of the staff members were harmed. She also told Sophie that she couldn't wait to escape the hubbub of the emergency-family-meeting and was longing for a drink.

Sophie stole a glance to the note. She had memorized the address by now, but she couldn't bring herself to throw it away. After a restless night, her brain finally spitted out a decision, and then a plan, before it allowed her to sleep.

She would go to  _Oswald's_ , just not as someone interested in an occupation, but as a guest. Mingling with the club's clientele might be the best way to gather information without arising suspicion.

Should she bring Gina? She had never gone to a club by herself and wasn't even sure if this was something people actually do. So, being accompanied by a friend seemed to be the more natural option there. Yet, Sophie wasn't too keen on dragging Gina into the premises of someone who could well be a Mafiosi.

On the other hand, experience had shown that other places were not necessarily safer either, so perhaps visiting the lion's den wouldn't pose so much of a threat.

_Hey Gina, I'm so glad everything is okay, and I honestly think both of us could use a drink. Or 5. Have you ever been to a place called 'Oswald's'? I overheard people talking about it and thought we could give it a try!_

In fact, Gina had been to the club before, but apparently it had been renamed recently and she was excited to see how the place had changed

* * *

The next day, Gina invited herself over to her apartment at 6 PM and brought a rather big purse that was stuffed with not only a ridiculous variety of make-up, but also two expensive looking dresses.

"I am not sure I like where this is going", Sophie stated when her friend unpacked the items on her kitchen table which she had freed of any dirty dishes or strange notes earlier that day. "Oh, come on, Sophie! Only rich people go there, and I don't want to see either of us paying for their drinks… because we cannot afford to.", she added dryly when she saw Sophie's raised eyebrows. Sophie took a deep breath and decided to submit to her friend's good will.

When she looked into the mirror, she wasn't feeling too self-conscious. The black dress that Gina made her wear was actually quite alright. It wasn't too tight or revealing, but flattered her physique and her face didn't feel too plastered. In contrast to her dark clothing and eye make-up, Gina had settled for a tea green dress and made herself up fittingly.

Thanks to the bottle of wine that Gina had brought along as well, Sophie had managed to give herself some liquid courage. She felt lightheaded and excited and was sure that, even if she did not manage to connect all the dots, she was still going to have fun tonight.

Gina had been right, the place  _smelled_ of wealth. Rich people wearing expensive clothes were drinking expensive alcohol.

_Oswald's_ was a classy establishment and gave the impression that time had stopped within its walls a couple of decades ago. With a sigh of relief, Sophie realized that it had been wise to give her friend the decisive power over her evening attire. She wasn't too underdressed, which gave her the hope to mingle more or less effortlessly with the rest of the guests.

The place wasn't crammed with people and there were many tables still unoccupied. Several round tables were arranged in front of a stage and seemed to be the most popular seating option as most of the customers had chosen them.

The people sitting there seemed like sitting ducks to Sophie, far more illuminated by the elegant lamps above them than customers sitting at the bar or in the booths.

Fortunately, Gina wanted to go to the bar and dragged Sophie, who could not even remotely imitate her friend's confident strides, to the counter. The bartender was quite the sight.

Not only was the man tall, he was also rather big and had a kind-looking face.  _His spirit animal would be a friendly grizzly bear_ , Sophie thought.

"What can I get you, ladies?", he inquired warmly. While Sophie unsuccessfully searched the walls behind him for some kind of price list, Gina had already ordered a Gin Tonic for the two of them. "First round's on me" she declared happily.

She took her drink and faced Sophie: "To an amazing night and a few weeks without fires or gunfights!", she toasted solemnly. "To a few weeks of peace and quiet", Sophie sighed with a one side of her mouth curled upwards and clicked her glass to Gina's.

As Gina took a large sip of her drink, Sophie stole a glance towards the bartender and caught him watching them thoughtfully with one eyebrow quirked.  _So much for laying low._

"So, why is this place called  _Oswald's_?", Sophie asked him in an attempt to distract him from whatever thoughts he was having.

"You two lovely ladies have never been here before?" It was more of an observation than a question, so Sophie settled for a shy, harmless smile instead of a verbal reply. "Well, it's the boss's first name."

"Uhhh!", Sophie exclaimed with feigned surprise, "I thought you were the owner". She forced herself to let out a small giggle. Acting drunk and flirty really helped her with the blushing. Pushing her self-respect aside, she added: "Sorry, I just assumed this was your club because you look like it belongs to you."

Sophie was getting worried that she might have overdone it when the man's face took on an expensive expression. After a few seconds, he seemed to have collected himself and looked flattered.  _Phew._

"No worries! I have just been working here for a long time, so I sort of blend in with the furniture", he said with laugh that did not entirely reach his eyes. Yet, his facial expression was kind and he gave Sophie a warm look. "The boss is the man over there", he pointed to a figure sitting at one of the tables in front of the stage, "he likes to be called penguin."

"Penguin? Like the animal?", Gina chimed in, "well, that's a strange nickname!", she slightly rose from her stool to get a better view on the man and propped herself up on the counter. Sophie watched the bartender's and other customer's eyes wandering to her friend's cleavage and wondered whether Gina had chosen this pose purposefully. "Huh, there actually is some resemblance", she smiled as she sat down again.

While the bartender announced that they wouldn't have to pay for their next drink, Sophie excused herself and went in the direction of the bathroom. While pretending to be looking for something in her purse, she walked very slowly and shot several glances to both sides.

When she realized that the bald man wasn't present, she slightly relaxed. The other guests seemed to be 'normal'. There was no one who looked like they were criminals, much less like they were carrying any kind of weapons.

She forgave herself for bringing Gina.

On her way back, she managed to get a good view on the 'boss'. Sophie would have anticipated him to be more terrifying.

He wasn't tall, and his skin was extraordinarily pale, building an intense contrast to the black colour of his hair and the dark clothes he was wearing.  _He looks like a gothic dandy_ , Sophie thought to herself.

He didn't look like a professional mob boss to Sophie. More like… an artist. Maybe a painter or an actor? Or an orchestra conductor?

From the distance, she couldn't make out the colour of his eyes, and it was impossible for her to say if this man carried kindness in his eyes.

She got back to the bar and focused on her Gin Tonic and talking to her friend. Gina got what she wanted:

None of them paid for their drinks.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie gets two new jobs.

 

* * *

_Is there a topic you could talk about for hours?_

_I am really passionate about animals and work in a dog shelter, so I can talk about them for hours, if people don't stop me. I am actually better at remembering the dogs' names than those of my girlfriend's relatives. It's driving her insane. – Matthew, 32_

* * *

Sophie was feeling frustrated. The last evening had produced more questions than answers- and also a throbbing headache which made it hard for her to get out of bed.

She would love to go to  _Oswald's_  again to find out more. Maybe she could gain the barkeeper's trust and pick his brain for information. On the other hand, she didn't enjoy deceiving people. The very thought of flirting her way out of a parking ticket made her cringe. Making goo-goo eyes at the barkeep wasn't really an option.

In addition, Sophie didn't like the way his attention to their conversation had peaked when Gina mentioned the fire

Of course she was being paranoid, but she was sure that this was probably a good thing. Any employee of the man who hired the bald man should be treated with care.  _He seemed like a good person, though._ She thought about how sad the barkeeper had looked and sighed wistfully. Sophie would have loved to interview him for her blog. Oh, the stories he must have in store!

Barkeepers in general were rather interesting to her. In her mind, the image of a run-down pub with only a handful of customers sitting at the bar, purring their hearts out to the one who purred them drinks, popped up. They would tell stories about heartbreak, family tragedies, and nostalgically share fragments of times that had long passed. What stories would a barkeeper whose boss was probably a mafiosi have to tell? Sophie would have loved to work as a barkeeper.

She forced herself to snap out of her daydreaming- _I need to stop regarding people as a source for literature-_ and continued to think about the problem at hand: her dissatisfied curiosity.

Another possibility for gathering information would be becoming a regular and observe the place more often. This way, she could see what kind of people the penguin-man interacted with. Yet, she didn't want to get too close to draw attention. Perhaps she should just give up.

Sophie felt sorry for herself. She had hoped that the evening at  _Oswald's_  would at least partly satisfy her curiosity. It was rather disappointing.

Moreover, the library hadn't called her back yet and Sophie couldn't quite shake the feeling that she wouldn't get her dream job.  _At least that means the place probably won't burn down anytime soon_ , she thought dryly.

Sophie settled in front of her computer and opened her novel, keen to use this day to continue her work. It took her about 30 minutes to give up.

Instead, she opened a newspaper and looked at the job section.  _I wish I could stop doing this_ , she thought before calling a restaurant that was looking for a kitchen help. When they told her that she could start in a couple of hours, she allowed herself an aspirin and a shower.

* * *

To her surprise, Sophie enjoyed working in the kitchen. Chopping vegetables and cleaning dishes was exhausting, but in a different way than waiting tables. She could focus on just the task at hand and was for once glad that she did not have to deal with any customers.

It was physically exhausting and the air in the kitchen hot and steamy, but Sophie didn't mind. She didn't need to look presentable and she could laugh loudly with her colleagues down here without gaining disapproving looks by her superiors. Her colleagues were warmhearted people who had been nice to her from the very start and who miraculously managed to retain a relaxed attitude in spite of how stressful things could become in the kitchen.

Furthermore, she felt  _safe_ there.

If she was honest with herself, she had begun to think that she was cursed in some way and drew doom to every place that employed her. She knew that these thoughts were both superstitious and self-absorbed.  _It's not like the bald man is purposefully choosing places where I work_ , she scolded herself.

Yet, she was grateful to have a job where she remained more or less hidden in the background.

The crushing downside of her new occupation was that the low hourly wage was not compensated with any tips, forcing her to get an additional cleaning job which she definitely did not enjoy as much, as it left her smelling of detergents and sweat.

_This is only temporary_ , she thought, as she stretched her muscles after having spent the last hours cleaning a very big part of an immensely huge building. Scrubbing a ridiculously long staircase had made her knees ache, so standing and walking was a nice change.

Sophie was glad that her way home from the office wasn't that long, Gotham wasn't a safe place at night and the fact that the cold, which had even further intensified lately, caused her stiff limbs to tremble did not particularly improve her spirits.

The sound of sirens wailing in the distance had long ceased to worry Sophie. For the people living in this city, they had long become a background noise that they grew so accustomed to that they don't even hear it anymore.

Only when she sensed someone moving in a dark side alley to her right and fear began to infiltrate her heart, Sophie became painfully aware of the sirens.

"You have to be fucking kidding me."

* * *

 


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie tries to initiate small talk.

The gun that had been aimed at her was put down swiftly after she had so eloquently voiced out her surprise.

Sophie did not like the idea of meeting _him_ in her neighbourhood at night. Yet, the initial fear she had felt strangely ceased to a larger extent than she would have anticipated after she realized that the figure in the shadows was him.

She wasn’t sure why recognizing him in a dark alley calmed her down, it was definitely not normal to feel relaxed when encountering a murderer in an empty street. But living in Gotham seemed to slowly erase her normality and to replace it with unreasonable recklessness.   

The fact that he hadn’t harmed her before and even tried to do her a favour the last time they met assured Sophie that he wasn’t too likely to kill or harm her unless she gave him a good reason to. At least that was what she chose to believe for her own sanity’s sake.

She decided to give in to her curiosity and gave him an ironic smile. “Hi. Am I right to assume that you are walking away from that?”, she asked boldly and pointed to the direction of the noise.

When he stepped out of the ally and into the dimly lit street, Sophie could see that he wasn’t in the best mood. She quickly turned off her smile and was glad that she hadn’t tried to be funny.

Frowningly, he gave her a short nod. Sophie was surprisingly pleased that he wasn’t in his usual taunting disposition. He seemed more like a normal person when he looked this pissed.

It was utterly fascinating.

Sophie wasn’t sure why he stopped and she immediately started racking her brain for possibilities. Was he expecting her to help? If so, in what way? She felt his intense gaze on her and thought that maybe he was contemplating the same.

Her instinct told her that it would be best to not offer him any help. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself and she also didn’t want to volunteer for becoming an accomplice to whatever he had done now. So she remained silent.

But she knew, that if he asked her for help, she would not say no. Not that she thought he would accept a ‘no’.   

When Sophie realized that the idea of helping him did not repulse her, she became more absorbed by her brain and its efforts to figure out why her ethical convictions had gone on holiday, and paid less attention to the man in front of her.

Her face must have taken on a puzzled expression or at least given away her lack of attention, because the bald man suddenly decided that their one-sided conversation was over.

Without another word, he passed her by and walked towards where she had come from, leaving her standing where she was dumbfoundedly. Baffled by his rudeness, she looked after him.

Sophie got the impression that neither her words nor her (lack of) manners had had an effect on him. He probably would have gone as unceremoniously if she hadn’t said anything at all.

Giving a silent sigh and a shrug, Sophie took her eyes off the shadows he had stepped back into and started moving herself, not wanting to humiliate herself by gaping after him any longer.

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me”, he called over his shoulder, not sparing her a second glance.

 _How could I,_ she thought, _I don’t even know your name._

Instead of dignifying him with an answer, Sophie kept on walking as if their paths had never crossed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I know this is really short, but I'm going to make it up to you with the next two chapters. :)  
> I also realized that I am not too content with the time leaps in the second last chapter and might change it slightly once I come up with a more elegant solution- if ever.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie doesn't like basements.

To her surprise, Sophie had slept like a baby that night. And when she woke up, she couldn’t even remember her dreams. Yet, she couldn’t shake the feeling that a bald man had made an appearance in them.

With a cup of coffee in her hands, Sophie spent the full morning in front of the TV, waiting for it to tell her about anything that had happened last night, but it gave away nothing.

She couldn’t understand how someone was able to do so many awful things and not have his face shown all over the news. How could he get away with that? Were the police really so inept? She thought back to her little visit to the precinct and remembered the officer’s lack of determination and soberness.

Flinching, she realized that part of her had hoped to hear about another massacre and the bald man’s name. _If I really want to know it so badly, I should just ask him the next time I see him._

At this rate, she was rather sure that there was going to be a next time.

Her thoughts were interrupted when the TV announced breaking news. Sophie stared at the screen. The mayoral candidate, Janice Caulfield, had been found dead in her office last night. Someone had killed her.

Sophie had read about Caulfield’s political agenda in the papers and couldn’t help feeling shocked. She been planning to vote for the lady who was so eager to reduce the city’s carbon monoxide emission while increasing its social equality.

She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to murder her. There also had been attempts to kill the other candidate, Theo Galavan, she remembered _. Maybe someone is trying to get rid of their competition,_ she mused.

Did Hobbs, the third candidate, ask the penguin-man to take out the others? Did they have some sort of business relation going on? But wouldn’t the deaths of his competitors deem him the main suspect?

Two other things caught her attention. Firstly, Caulfield had been stabbed more than a dozen times with a large knife or dagger. Secondly, her office was not exactly in Sophie’s neighbourhood.

She somehow assumed that the bald man only used guns - _or fire_ , she shuddered _–_ and it would have taken him more than an hour to walk from the crime scene to where she had seen him last night.

_Wishful thinking_ , she caught herself _, you just don’t want to believe that he would murder your favourite candidate. Probably, his car just broke down or something._

She wished that she could just ask him. But Sophie couldn’t imagine a parallel universe where he would explain his job to her.

A look at the clock showed her that she had wasted enough time sprawling around on her couch. She would have to continue her brooding at work. 

 

* * *

>   _Joice had never seen anything like this in all her life- and she was already eleven years old. She was standing at the window of her bedroom and looked outside with wide eyes. If her throat hadn’t become so dry and her tongue so numb, she was sure she would have screamed, but now, only a small whimper escaped her lips. She watched the thing swirl around her house in large circles, making a swooshing sound. It was about midnight and the sun had set hours ago, but the blurry shadow was so much darker than its background and anything else Joice had ever seen. She wondered how it was possible for something to be darker than black. At some point, the light post in front of her garden became dimmer, flickered once, and then went out. Joice couldn’t see a thing. She only heard her own ragged breathing and the strange noise of whatever was outside._

* * *

 

Cleaning a huge building was both dull and stimulating in a way. Without any people around and nothing to pay attention to but the task at hand, Sophie could either switch her brain off and fully commit to mopping floors or occupy her mind with anything she liked while her body robotically did the job.

She was free to think about her novel, to plan the storyline, to create a draft of the next chapter. She could have used the time to fully immerse in the universe she was creating.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she replayed every encounter she had had with the bald man and her conversation with the bartender in her head until everything was sparkling clean.

Fortunately, Sophie only had to do the ground level and the awful staircase of the building. Her employer had told her that the first level was occupied by someone who had hired their own cleaning staff and that she was not to disturb them.

Not that she minded. It would have taken hours and amounts of energy that she was not willing to spend to clean another level.

After everything looked as flawless as it was supposed to, Sophie grabbed her cleaning equipment and brought it down to the basement. Somehow, she always felt a sense of accomplishment after she cleaned something up, be it her house or this building. _Probably because it’s nice to see when something you do actually has an effect_ , she thought flatly.

The part she hated most, besides the staircase, was the basement. Some of the light bulbs down there desperately needed changing as they were either burnt-out or flickering in a not-so-assuring-way.

Sophie usually wasn’t a wuss. But this basement freaked her out.

It took her some time to find the right key, and Sophie felt herself tense more with every minute she spent down there. Finally, the lock clicked, and her deed was done.

She quickly made her way to the stair, she couldn’t wait to get upstairs and out of here, when she heard a gunshot.

  _Oh no. Please no._

She froze in an instant. More gunshots. In this building. Her survival instinct kicked in and she quickly contemplated her options. Could she make it to the exit?

Just when she was about to take another step upstairs, she heard people running on the upper floor. _So, back to the basement it is._

As she hid in a dark corner, she anxiously listened to the turmoil above, and hoped that no one would find her. People were shouting, running, screaming in pain, thudding on the floor. The sounds of violence came closer and, just when Sophie’s teeth had started to clatter because she couldn’t supress her trembling any longer, they passed her by.

She heard sirens and felt relief spreading through her body. Shakenly, she picked herself up and carefully sneaked upstairs. Her ears hadn’t betrayed her; the people with the guns were gone.

But they had left a bloody mess.

The floor which she had so thoroughly cleaned during the last couple of hours was bloodstained. Apparently, they had left through the main entrance. She would take the back way and get the hell out of here.

She should have run, probably, but she just couldn’t force herself to walk any faster. Her legs felt as if they weighed tons. It felt as if she was walking on jelly instead of asphalt. Her pace was agonizingly slow, but she couldn’t help it.

Sophie focused to put one foot in front of the other and on normalizing her breathing. It took her an eternity to make it around the building. In the distance, she could make out flashing blue light. The police were here, and the people who had left the building probably ran straight into their arms.

She stopped and stared at the scene with wide eyes. A sane person would have walked away. An unhealthily curious person would have hidden behind an object close-by and not corrupted their safety to gawk at something dangerous.

Sophie, however, slowly sneaked closer to the scene and tried to remain hidden in the shadows of the buildings. Finally, when she was close enough to see what was going on, she crouched down behind a dumpster and took a peek.

There were bodies lying on the floor and several police officers who had taken cover behind cars. She couldn’t really see how many there were, as they themselves only poked their heads out for a couple of seconds to aim…

To aim at something that was standing on her side of the whole thing. Sophie oppressed a groan. She had walked close towards whoever was up against the police. _If I die tonight, this would be a case of natural selection._

Her eyes quickly scanned the area until they found the target of the police officers who had spread out like a freaking SWAT team.

It was the bald man.

_Of course._ Sophie started complaining to the universe. _What’s the point of moving to a big city when you always meet the same person? Seriously? What are the odds?_

Not that she minded seeing him, she just wasn’t keen on being confronted with the violence his appearance always seemed to entail.

Although Sophie was sure that he was, well, _skilled_ at this whole criminal thing, she couldn’t imagine him taking out all these people. She felt her heart sink.

Sophie realised that she was worried. _I need some serious counselling._

About a second later, another shot rang through the street and she saw him drop to the floor. _Did he just say “unexpected”?_

She could feel herself standing up and moving out from behind the dumpster when he, in a swift motion, shot a hydrant, and got up to flee.

Without giving it any thought, Sophie ran into his direction and made it into the side alley a second before he did. When she entered his vision, he jerked to a halt and raised his gun up threateningly until he recognized her.

“Also unexpected”, he commented flatly as he lowered his weapon and started moving again.

Sophie kept up with his pace and eyed him anxiously. He seemed to be out of breath and held his left arm slightly lower than the other one. “You got shot.”, she said slowly. She could almost hear him clench his teeth. “Yes”. He sounded pissed.

"How bad is it?” – “Graze wound.” – “Huh.”

She jogged along in silence, unsure what to do. “Do you have an escape route?”, she asked and was met with silence. He had put his guns back into their straps and pressed one hand against his left shoulder. Sophie couldn’t make out his face in the dark, but she was almost sure that his breathing had become heavier.

They had left a couple of blocks behind when the sound of sirens came closer. Sophie knew that they were probably going to scour the streets. When she was about to look around the corner of the street they were walking on, she felt a firm grip on her arm and was dragged back into the shadows.  She turned to frown at him and he let go of her.

“Wait until they move away. Afterwards, you can go home.”, he muttered.

Sophie exhaled impatiently before asking him: “What are you going to do?” For an answer, he wordlessly gestured towards his guns.

That did seem a bit suicidal to her. With some effort, Sophie successfully managed to suppress an eye roll.

“If you don’t have a plan right now, I can take you to my apartment. I have a first aid kit and you can hide there until they give up. You won’t make it far like this.”

Sophie could feel his eyes intently scrutinizing her face for what felt like a long time.

Then, he nodded.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie has a guest.

While they silently walked closer to her apartment, seemingly both absorbed in their own thoughts, Sophie realized several things.

Firstly, their walking pace was undergoing a barely noticeable, yet constant decline. Something she would not have recognized if the adrenaline wasn’t challenging her to be overly attentive,

Secondly, his breathing was…loud. Considering their former encounters, Sophie knew that this man could be so quiet that most people didn’t sense his presence until he actively drew attention to himself. Now, she could hear his exhales despite the distance they kept to each other while walking.

 And thirdly, she was feeling worried.

She was about to give refuge to someone who had just attempted to assassinate Randall Hobbs, an important political figure.

Sophie had more or less come to terms with being acquainted with a murderer for now, so she pushed the images of the bodies - that were probably still lying on the freshly cleaned marble - aside and instead wondered about the possible repercussions of helping someone who had tried to kill a celebrity.  

In addition, bringing him to her flat obviously meant showing him where she lived. And she was rather sure that this was not the best idea. Would she need to find a new place? Was there a place cheaper than her apartment?

What troubled her even more was that she was not only concerned about how her criminal record and domicile safety would be affected. She was also worried about the bald man. 

he dared to shoot a quick glance to the figure that was a couple of steps behind her and apparently avoided getting close to the street lights. He instantly glared back at her, and she did not dare to ask him how he was holding up. He was still walking upright and fortunately not stumbling. Yet, Sophie could easily tell that he was in pain; his whole form radiated tension.

 

When they stopped in front of her apartment, Sophie could hear the wailing of police sirens getting closer to them and frantically searched her bag for her key.

The unpleasant sounds became louder and her hands shaky. Eventually her trembling fingers got hold of the key- and let it fall on the pavement. She heard a dramatic sigh next to her and hurried to pick up the crucial item.

She desperately tried to insert the key into the lock, but she couldn’t make it out in the darkness and only produced scraping sounds. She felt an uncomfortable mixture of panic and embarrassment. _I’m too stupid to open the door._

A warm and dry hand gently took the key out of her sweaty fingers and Sophie could feel his right arm brushing against hers as he unlocked the door. “Walk”, he said calmly, and for once it did not sound taunting or subtly threatening.

The shock had finally kicked in and Sophie instantly obeyed and moved up the stairs, glad that her company was apparently more composed and willing to take charge.

It took him longer than her to reach her door, and when she stood in front of it, it occurred to her that he still had her keys and that they had not turned the light on when they entered the building.

After her fingers left the light switch, she turned to the bald man who was now standing behind her and used the light to finally examine him properly.

He looked paler than usual, his jaw was clenched, and he was sweating. _He looks awful_ , she concluded, and anxiously started chewing her lower lip. _He probably won’t go to a hospital. What if the bullet’s still in?_   While her eyes focused on his left shoulder, he carefully shoved her aside and effortlessly opened her door.

 

“Nice place”, he said dryly, and Sophie was almost glad that he had regained his mocking tone. His condition couldn’t be too bad if he still had the energy to be rude.

Her flat wasn’t too messy. She had cleaned it up the other day and the only things that could be criticized were a half-empty cup that had been forgotten on the kitchen counter, some used cutlery in the sink, and her crumpled blanket that rested of the sofa.

“Thanks.”, she decided to act as if he had meant it as a compliment, not wanting to start a discussion about society’s distribution of wealth. If she told him that cleaners, waitresses, and kitchen helps surprisingly did not fair to well on the income scale, he would probably ask her why she wasn’t selling drugs instead.

“I’ll get my first-aid kit and some pain killers, you can sit down on the couch. Or wherever.” When he moved towards the sofa, he dropped the arm that was clutching his shoulder and she saw that the fabric of his sleeve had darkened with blood- and that he was wearing a huge pin above his heart. A pin with red and white stripes. Sophie snorted.

“Nice pin.”, she said with raised eyebrows and she could have sworn that she could see the corner of his mouth twitch as if he had almost smiled.

 

Without waiting for a reply, she rushed into the bathroom. _Aspirin probably isn’t the best idea_. She found something more effective and less blood-thinning which her dentist had given her after he had extracted her wisdom teeth last year. Not one of her fondest memories.

When she came back, he had already taken off his shirt and Sophie made sure to keep her face smooth as she shortly eyed his upper body, as if to look for further injuries, and then quickly glued her eyes on his shoulder.

His body looked almost normal. He wasn’t _ripped_ , he didn’t have a six pack, only his arms and shoulders were muscular, although not overly. He looked like someone who would exercise his body not to look strong but to _be_ strong.

Sophie didn’t care about people’s body types and seeing a guy shirtless, no matter if he was obese or a bodybuilder, usually did not affect her. What startled her wasn’t his physique or the absence of hair. It was the pink scars and the red cuts that stood out in strong contrast to his pale skin. She forced herself not to stare.

_Act like a professional_. But who was she kidding? She was not professional. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had attended a first aid course.

“Do you know how to sew?”, he inquired. “Only if you want me to fix your sleeve.”, she handed him the pain killers and avoided looking at him, “You can take two of them, but they’ll make you a bit dizzy.” Without reading the label, he popped one of them into his mouth. _I could have given him anything_. Sophie almost shook her head in disbelief.

The injury on his shoulder looked disgusting, but expect for that not too bad. Blood was slowly, yet consistently pouring out of a gash whose size was comparable to her middle finger. Once she realized that there was no bullet stuck in his flesh, relief spread through her body.

Sophie thought that he was a rather good patient. He scarcely flinched despite her clumsiness and refrained from criticizing her. Even when she sterilized his wound without warning him beforehand, he only tensed up.

She wasn’t sure if the bleeding had been much stronger before, but she assumed that approximately forty minutes had passed since he had been shot, and decided that a regular bandage probably wouldn’t do the job. The application of the compression bandage, unskilfully conducted, caused him to let out a short hiss.

When she was done, Sophie muttered a quiet apology and glanced up to his face- something she had been avoiding throughout the procedure. His eyes were closed, and his jaw muscles looked so cramped that she had to fight the urge to stroke his cheek to relax them.

Sophie felt slightly nauseous; apparently, she wasn’t too keen on blood. Furthermore, she felt terrible for having caused him additional pain, although she knew that letting him lose more blood would not have been a better option. At least, this experience showed her that she was definitely not fit to ever become a nurse.

With her eyes still fixed on his face, she realized that a part of her had perceived dressing his wound as intimacy – an intimacy that she had enjoyed. She had enjoyed touching his skin and she liked the thought that he put enough trust in her to allow her to help him far too much. _I need to stop being a creep._

She thought that it would be best to put some distance between them and decided to make herself useful. It wasn’t long until she had brought him some iron tablets, orange juice, and a black sweater that she held is possession due to her weakness for using men’s clothing as oversized night attire.

It was weird to see the bald man in something so casual as a sweatshirt, but Sophie felt utterly relieved when he zipped the shirt up.

Sophie usually kept her cool around men. But she was certain that the bald man noticed every glance she sneaked towards him, so she did not want him to catch her staring at his scars. And the more she tried to avoid doing something, the more she usually was tempted to do it.

Once again, he swallowed the pills she gave him without asking what it was and washed it down with the juice, before breaking the silence.

 “My people will pick me up in a couple of hours.”

Sophie’s curiosity spiked rapidly, and she looked at him expectantly, hoping that he might elaborate on the matter. He didn’t.

In light of her recent aid to this man, Sophie decided that she deserved some answers.

“What happened earlier tonight?”, she asked, hoping that he might tell her why his boss wanted to see the all of Gotham’s potential next mayor’s dead.

He frowned at her. “I messed up. Big time.”, he growled lowly.  

It seemed wise to avoid any discussion that might reach ethical realms. She would need to settle for more specific questions.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie has a sleepover.

>   _At some point, Joice had covered her ears to drown out the noise of the thing outside, but the deep sound seemed to resonate through her skull. With awe, she realized that the whooshing had gotten louder because it had gotten closer, changing its orbit, narrowing the circle. A couple of nights ago, it had only looked like a harmless flock of birds that was flying around the town. Back then, Joice had been fascinated and wondered why those birds flew in circles all night. Her creative mind had even made up a tragic story about a bird family which came back from the south and could not find its home after a long winter. But this wasn’t a sorrow-stricken swarm of sparrows. This was something else entirely and she had led it straight to her home._

* * *

“Did you kill Janice Caulfield?”, she asked.

He flashed her a short, somewhat devilish smile and tiredly shook his head. It was probably cruel of her to interrogate him when he was likely in pain and definitely in need of rest, but Sophie was also sure that she was more likely to get answers when he was this vulnerable. Also, he had taken a second pain killer a couple of minutes ago.

His smile had confused her. “Did…”, she started, “did your boss have someone else kill her?”

“You’re a smart one.”, he stated condescendingly after giving her a scrutinizing look.

“What I am trying to understand is why your employer wants two kill all the mayoral candidates. I mean, they all have different agendas, so I don’t really see how this is political.”

While she was talking, he had risen one non-existent eyebrow and slightly squinted his eyes. Sophie felt like she was on the right track.

“I don’t care about politics”, he gave as an answer. Sophie noticed the short pause he put before the preposition, and decided to ignore it along with the rest of this statement. 

“So, I think it’s about money. But there are just three candidates. _Were_ just three candidates. And there were attempts on both Hobbs’ and Galavan’s lives. Does your boss want to get rid of all the candidates? Does he want to become mayor himself or will he support someone who still has to join the race?”

The bald man suppressed a yawn.

“Is someone else paying the penguin-man to take out the candidates?”

Sophie hadn’t meant to give away that she knew who his boss was and the way his eyes lit up when she mentioned his name inclined that he had not missed it.

His facial expression was either pleased or menacing. She could never tell.

Silence spread out between the two of them. Frowningly, Sophie kept her eyes on his. Sophie suddenly realized that she hadn’t felt intimidated by him for several minutes- ever since she had started this conversation.

She had always prided herself to be good with words, good with stories. And now that she was trying to uncover something that might prove to be a political conspiracy, she strangely felt in her element. She wasn’t going to drop the subject.

“I went to the address you gave me and talked to a barkeeper -”

“Butch.”, he interrupted her gleefully.

“What?” _Did he just call me-?_

“Butch. It’s his name.” The bald man almost purred the last word. 

“Right. So, erm, he mentioned who your boss is. That’s how I know.”, she concluded lamely.

Her hopes of a quid pro quo exchange of information were crushed almost immediately.

“I don’t talk about my work” he said expressionlessly.

She kept herself from sulking. “How about a proper introduction instead?”, she proposed and decided to make the beginning, “my name is- “, but got cut off in the process.

“Sophie Brent.”, he interrupted her again, and sent a shiver down her spine.

Why did he know her name? How did he know?

“I saw it on your nameplate.” _Oh._

_I need to stop being so full of myself._

“My name is Victor Zsazs.”

Finally. She could already see herself conducting some serious research. After having gathered at least this information, Sophie felt like she had accomplished her mission. Moreover, she had kept him up long enough.

She was rather sure that he wasn’t one to show weakness. _He’d probably force himself to stay up all night before asking me to let him sleep._

“Okay Victor. I am going to take a shower and you should get some rest. See you in the morning.”

After he gave her a short nod, Sophie disappeared into her bathroom to take an extended shower, while her thoughts remained focused on the murderer sitting in the living room.

* * *

When she finally emerged from the bathroom, the sky was already brightening up and Sophie caught herself thinking that she would have heard birds chirping if she was still living in her almost rural hometown and not in a city this big.

She put on a pair of sweatpants and a washed-out shirt and shot a longing glance towards her bed before returning to the living room.

It was silly, but her expertise in the medical field was so very rudimentary that she just couldn’t dare to leave him unmonitored for the rest of the night.

Not that she knew what to do if he developed a fever or dropped dead from her sofa. Although, calling an ambulance would definitely produce an entertaining story for anyone not involved.

She silently carried her most comfortable chair opposite to the sofa where her intriguing guest was sleeping, fetched the novel she was half-heartedly reading at the moment, and sat down.

Admittedly, the book in her hands was a cheap alibi. Sophie knew that she was far too tired and exhausted to even read a grocery list, but she felt that she needed something to occupy her hands with.

She opened the book and carefully rested it on her lap, before finally using this moment to do what she had not been able to do unnoticed before.

Her eyes fixed on the figure in front of her. Victor Zsasz was sleeping in a sitting position that looked thoroughly uncomfortable. One part of Sophie felt truly sorry for him. Another part was glad that she could now fully look at his face without having to bend over a lying body.

It would have been too awkward to have him wake up with her stooping over him.

His skin looked even paler in the dawn and Sophie could see that the dark shadows under his eyes stood out in a strong contrast to his white skin.

She had never seen anyone looking this tired- and he did not seem to be getting a good rest. His forehead was still glistening with sweat and at the same time, he held his arms close to his torso, as if he was cold. Even in sleep, he did not look at peace.

Pity formed in her stomach and spread out throughout her body, infesting not only her heart, but also her brain.

She knew that no one in their right mind would be worried about the well-being of a notorious murderer. But Sophie was tired of constantly reminding herself that it was crazy to care. It was exhausting to always monitor her thoughts and emotions, to stop anything abnormal in its tracks.

It would be alright for her to cut herself some slack, she decided, as she slowly rose from her chair and silently approached the sofa to pick up the blanket that had been dragged aside on the armrest.

Very carefully, Sophie managed to cover the pale man with the quilt without waking him up and turned the heating on before returning to her chair. _The least I can do is make sure that he is warm._

* * *

>    _Joice wondered if she should regret having kept what had happened a secret. But as she stared into the deep blackness and vainly tried to fix her eyes on the source of the swirling sound, she realized that neither her friends nor her parents would have known what to do. The grown-ups would have never believed her in the first place. And her friends… were safe. The thought that they were not in danger because she had kept everything to herself made Joice feel very selfless and heroic. She straightened her back and crossed her arms to stop her body from trembling while she looked into the nothingness outside in anticipation._  

* * *

 

The feeling of discomfort was the first thing she noticed and probably what woke her up. Her body felt shattered, her joints were cracking when she moved, and her muscles were aching terribly. She had fallen asleep on the chair.

Once she fully came to her senses, yesterday’s events hit her, and she immediately glanced towards the sofa which was now deserted.

Apparently, he had gone without saying goodbye or leaving a thank-you-note. What he did leave was a dark-red bloodstain on her sofa-cover. _Awesome. He left me some evidence._

Sophie decided that it would be wise to start her day with stuffing some things into her washing machine. When she got up from the chair, she almost fell over the blanket that was lying on the floor before her. 

Had he covered her with it before he left?

Sophie snorted. _Don’t flatter yourself. It’s more likely he threw it into your face when he noticed that you tucked him in._

If she was honest with herself, she really wanted to believe that he did in fact reciprocate her kind gesture. It just seemed very unlikely for someone who wouldn’t even return a smile. _And is a cold-blooded killer._

But if he had, maybe that meant that he wasn’t so cold-blooded after all. And if she could manage to form some kind of friendship with him, maybe she could not only unravel the mystery that surrounded him, but also set free his inner demons that she was sure to have seen in his sleeping features.

She decided to have a nice breakfast before she got too excited.

An endeavour that proved to be more difficult than she had expected. Sophie rolled her eyes in disbelief. Apparently, he had eaten the humble contents of her fridge and only left her one slice of bread


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie is bored.

She could not thoroughly reconstruct the days and weeks after Victor Zsasz had slept and bled on her couch.

Everything was sort of blurry, the ordinary processes of everyday life had been waiting around the corner and quickly dragged her back into their world.

She remembered hours and days of writing on her novel, of adding chapters effortlessly. The words had been pouring out of her incessantly in the beginning until, well, until they stopped. Now, Sophie was mostly editing- or ignoring her creation.

She remembered her employer calling her, probably the day after her meticulously cleaned workplace had been covered in blood and bodies, that he could not employ her for an indefinite period of time due to a series of terrible events.

She had almost laughed aloud at the déjà vu. The bald man had cost her another job.

She remembered washing her sofa cover several times before giving up on getting rid of the blood stain and the deciding to dye it black.

She remembered the envelope full of money that had appeared in her letter box.

Those were the things that had excited her in a way. The excessive writing that made her feel happy and almost proud of herself as it resembled her romantic idea of an eccentric author hunched over a type writer day and night. The destructive impact Victor Zsasz had once again made on her working life. The adrenaline pumping through her veins when she could not get rid of the bloodstain, of the  _proof_  of their encounter. And the cash.

The latter had almost put her into a crisis. She knew it was wrong to take it. But it had also been wrong to invite a murderer into her house. Should she have donated it? Giving money to charity was a luxury she honestly could not see herself entertaining anytime soon. Would she be indebted to him? Should she  _feel_  indebted to him?

As she blamed him for losing yet another job, she eventually decided that accepting the money would be fair. It was not like she could have given it back to him anyway.

She also regarded it as an indicator that he was fine. After all, her meagre medical expertise could have well offed him.

While she knew that the quantity of their coincidental encounters was ridiculously high for two people living in a metropolis like Gotham, she couldn't help but wonder why they had stopped now. .

The memory of something exciting happening in her life started to feel more and more distant. It was hard for her to admit, but Sophie actually missed the adrenaline and mortal fear. It seemed to be the only thing able to fuel her creativity and ability to write.

In a weird state of mind that she still could not justify to herself, she had even gone to  _Oswald's_  again, this time by herself, to see if Zsasz was there, only to find the place shut down.

By now, Gotham's version of "spring" had started and made itself noticeable by slightly longer days and warmer temperatures. And slightly more disturbing news on the television than usual.

Sophie could not wrap her head around it. Galavan becoming mayor had added to her suspicion that he had collaborated with the penguin-man to get rid of his competitors. At some point, the former mayor had reappeared, and his successor had been arrested for kidnapping him.

During the trial, mayor James told the public that he had been forced by the penguin, his real abductor, to blame the other candidate.

And just when things could not get any more confusing, Theo Galavan had been killed and the penguin got arrested for his murder.

What was the turning point for the work relationship they had entertained?

She just couldn't make sense of it.

Yet, seeing that the penguin-man was out of the picture for now also meant that Victor Zsasz was probably unemployed at the moment. In a very bizarre way that she was not proud of, she found this hilarious and the very thought brought a smug grin to her face. It seemed only fair to her.

_And it means that he is lying low and probably staying out of trouble._  She couldn't help feeling relieved. He had looked like he needed a holiday and at least a full week of sleep.

_I shouldn't care so much_ , she decided, neither happy with the part of her that missed the excitement this man always seemed to bring along, nor with the one that cared about his well-being.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie tries to get a life.

 

Sophie really tried her best to stop moping around. She wanted to embrace life, to meet people, to see the universe's mundanities in an ever so bright light.

She had accepted being stuck again when it came to her novel and once again resolved to ignore the document on her computer to the best of her abilities.

It would have been a good idea to take care of her little blog project instead, but her mind craved to be confronted with extraordinary people. People who were potentially dangerous and thus far more exciting than herself.

As she could neither find a new project nor inspiration to continue with her old ones, Sophie resorted to unusual means.

She got a social life again.

Gina was happy to integrate Sophie in what seemed to be an incredibly large circle of friends.

And so, Sophie went to work and then out for coffee, for tea, for lunch, for drinks, for dancing.

At some point, she even went out for dinner with a friend of a friend of a friend, well, with someone Gina might have known.

His name was Oliver and due to his work as a records clerk, Sophie had initially found it rather interesting to talk to him. It was as close as she got to fascinatingly gruesome stories about court hearings.

Oliver was about her age, maybe a year older, and had bright eyes which were in a rather nice shade of green and accompanied by crinkles in their corner when he smiled. And for someone in his job, Oliver smiled a lot. Gina had been happy and rather pleased with herself when she had seen them both chatting at a party that she hosted.

Sophie was sure that a normal person would have been swept of their feet if they were targeted by his million-dollar smile. But Sophie once more concluded that she was a weird person.

Listening to him talking did not come anywhere close to meeting Victor Zsasz. Nothing he told her would ignite her creativity and make her wish she had brought a notepad.

_Apparently, I need to be around criminals if I ever want to write another line_ , Sophie concluded disgruntledly as she slipped her wine unenthusiastically while Oliver told her about a case where a man had killed his spouse with an axe.

Oliver seemed as if he had hoped to send a shiver of awe down her spine and looked disappointed when all she could offer was a half-hearted "Oh, that's awful."

_Am I becoming psycho?_  Before she moved here, Sophie would have been shocked. But Gotham appeared to desensitize its citizens rather quickly.  _Not this city, exposure to criminals. Or rather me trying to befriend criminals_ , she corrected herself.  _And it's normal to not really care so much about people you don't know, isn't it?_

"Look at me, gabbling on about work", he paused to give her an opportunity to assure him that he wasn't or that she didn't mind. She let it pass. "while we should be talking about the cute girl in front of me."

Sophie was proud that she did not role her eyes at him. She thoroughly disliked being referred to as a 'cute girl'.

Oliver asked her about her hobbies and seemed as put off by her passion for literature as she was about his dislike for reading.

Moreover, Sophie was sure that Oliver was deterred by her poor small talk skills and still disappointed that his stories had not impressed her. Talking to him had been far more comfortable when they both were drunk.

They mostly ate in silence. As the only thing Sophie heard was her inner voice singing "awkward" in an imitation of various songs, she decided to focus on contemplating how she had gotten here, before accidentally saying the word out loud.

Why had she even agreed to go out with him in the first place? Just to find a substitute catalyst for her creativity? Because he had caught her off-guard when he asked her for her number? Because she had been drunk and felt flattered? Had it been out of boredom?

She couldn't say for sure, but she knew that she wasn't too proud of herself.

After they exited the restaurant, Oliver did not offer to walk her home to which Sophie let out a sigh of relief. She was thrilled to escape the awkwardness.

She buttoned her jacket and relished the almost clean air of the night.

One of the things Sophie liked most about having a long way home was that it gave her the opportunity to think and clear her head out. With a little bit of imagination, she could even pretend that the smog which was settling down at this time of day was simply fog and the street lights were stars.

_What was I thinking? I hate dating. And all this hanging around large groups of people? I don't even like meeting new people. I find it exhausting to have more than a handful of friends._

She decided to return to normal. Well,  _her_  normal. Trying to behave like a normal person her age didn't do much for her.

Maybe she should try something new. Find a new passion and get what her parents would call a decent job. Sophie felt her spirits sink. She had wanted to be an author for as long as she could remember.

* * *

It was like the universe had wanted to send her a sign. Given that the universe had a rather twisted sense of humour.

The likelihood of her running into Victor Zsasz seemed to drastically increase whenever she went into a dark street at night.

Unfortunately, the bald man appeared to be rather busy at this point, as he had taken cover behind a car and gleefully pointed two guns at a number of men in front of them.

Sophie stopped at stared at the situation in front of her. The men in front of her had probably seen her ages ago while she was still too deep in thought to watch her surroundings.

It would have been nice to meet her criminal acquaintance under nicer circumstances, or at least circumstances that did not include violence, for once. She wasn't that fastidious.

She highly doubted that they would just let her walk past them and mechanically started walking backwards. She had passed a car just a minute ago, about thirty feet from here. If they did not start shooting before she was there, she probably had a chance.

The tension in the air was almost palpable as she slowly took another step back. She dared to give the bald man a quick glance.

He was watching her with squinted eyes and furrowed brows.  _Great, he's irritated._ But at least he wasn't smirking.

The men's patience endured two more steps before the first gunshot rang through the air.

Sophie was amazed by how quickly and elegantly he could move.

In the blink of an eye, he had emerged from his cover and starting shooting at the men in front of them. Sophie saw a body fall to the ground, but it took her brain another couple of seconds before it could process that Zsasz had killed the man.

His aim seemed to be excellent- even while walking backwards.

At some point, he was standing right in front of her and continued slowly moving backwards.

"Move.", he ordered, as his back brushed against her body and Sophie still stood there dumbfoundedly.

Sophie obeyed and felt slightly dizzy as he maneuvered them behind the car, gripped her shoulder, and almost gently pushed her down into a crouching position.

She stared at him with wide eyes, unsure what to do. She didn't have to worry much about the latter. "Stay here." his expressionless voice commanded. He replaced his magazines so quickly that the motion looked blurry to Sophie, and left their hideout in an instant.

Sneaking a peak towards whatever was happening in front of the car did not occur to her. She focused solely on her breathing and the sounds and smells of guns being fired.

The quantity of shots seemed to decrease, and the gaps between the bangs got longer. Eventually, Sophie heard someone beg for his life- and being silenced.

Nausea rose in her and she could feel shivers down her spine.  _Not now,_ she pep-talked herself,  _I can feel sick later._

"You look pale", he commented joyfully. Sophie felt herself jump, she hadn't heard him coming back.

"Bad dinner", she replied. "Are you okay?"

His amusement seemed to rise at her concern. "Never better", he grinned at her, looking as satisfied as a child that had just built a pretty awesome river dam. Or destroyed one.

When she could no longer endure the way he was sneering down at her, Sophie struggled to her feet and almost fell over in the motion. Squatting on the floor for so long had put her off balance.

A firm grip on her upper arm kept her from falling and let go of her once she stood safely on her feet.

This man was confusing her. A lot.

Sophie stared at him in silence as he thoughtfully regarded her face.

"No questions tonight?", he asked in a dark, mocking tone, and nodded towards the dead men lying not too far from them with one arched eyebrow.

She had about a thousand of questions for him, but no idea where to start. And for someone who wanted to be an author, she also very little idea how to phrase them.

"How- ", she started,  _can you_   _take on so many guys without getting a scratch? Be so happy after killing? Show no mercy? How have you been doing since I last saw you? What have you been up to?_

"How does this job of yours work?", she asked with feigned confidence, "does your boss tell you to go somewhere and kill everyone?"

A childish part of her which longed for his approval thought that he might find her 'cool' if she acted nonchalant. As almost always, his face gave nothing away.

"I'm the boss's right hand.", he explained in what almost sounded like a purr, "Sometimes, I deliver messages and sometimes I deliver death."

Sophie could have sworn that he somehow saw the goose bumps on her skin through her clothes, because his facial expression turned into a broad grin.

She decided that she liked him more when he wasn't so smug. And perhaps that was what drove her to ask the next question.

"Why did you safe me?"

_I could have been collateral damage the first time we met._

Her question swiped the grin right off his face and Sophie observed him furrowing his brows and pressing his lips together.

"You helped me. We're even now."

Sophie nodded, and they continued to stare at each other. She had hoped that he would give another reason, although she wasn't sure what she had wanted to hear.

She realized that she wasn't scared to look at him directly anymore. Yet, it was thrilling to meet his eyes. She had missed him. The thought made her flinch.  _It's just because he's 'exciting',_  she assured herself,  _I don't even know him._

"I should go home now. Thank you, Victor." She didn't want to leave, but in her emotional state, it seemed best to go before blurting out any questions she might regret.

He stepped aside and as Sophie walked away, she could feel his gaze fixed on her back, even after she had passed the dead bodies at whom she did not dare looking at. Strangely, being watched by him felt reassuring.

Once she got home, she took a shower and got comfortable under the warm covers of her bed. It took Sophie several hours to fall asleep and she blamed the recent rush of adrenaline and the traumatic things she had seen earlier that night for her insomniac state. But that wasn't the whole truth.

When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed of Victor Zsasz.

* * *

_Joice would never forget the sensation of the thing getting under her skin, although she would never be able to find the right words to describe it to anyone. She had stood at her window in the pose of a warrior and looked as impressive as a girl of eleven years could when it had crept through the opening like a shadow or a gooey liquid. Joice hadn't bothered with closing the window as she was sure it wouldn't have made a difference. It had poured into her room and filled it with an earthy smell, spread out to every corner, touching every piece of furniture, and everything she owned, while faintly swirling around her, as if it was not daring to touch her. Joice watched the distance between her and the matter lessen as it came closer and closer, feeling her heart beating heavily in her chest. At first, it touched her hands and feet. It did not feel like human touch, nor like petting an animal. It felt like the subtle tingling that sometimes occurs a millisecond before someone's skin was about to make contact with hers. It spread over her whole body, from her limbs towards her center, and eventually reached her heart._

* * *

"I am ridiculous", Sophie told the mirror. The image in front of her should be proof enough that she should be out of puberty by now.  _Be a good grown-up. Be rational. Don't have dreams about murderers, they are supposed to be nightmare-material._

She did not like the whole 'damsel-in-distress'-thing. She considered herself to be a strong and self-sufficient person. So, Sophie was sure that being saved by him did not make it on the list of things that made him appealing to her.

It was more that she interpreted this as him not wanting her to die. Which seemed flattering, coming from someone who wins his bread by murdering people.

In addition, Sophie could not deny that she was fascinated by, well, dark stuff. Perhaps she even needed being exposed to it in order to keep on writing her novel. She just wasn't sure when fascination had mutated into attraction.

The smart thing to do would be avoiding Victor Zsasz. Getting any closer to him and his line of work would be a danger to her physical and mental well-being.

But, wouldn't risking her health to some extent be worth it if it got her any closer to finishing her novel? Not indulging into her fascination was one thing, but not being able to write anything equaled giving up on her dreams and leading an aimless life.

That actually sounded worse to her.

Sophie stopped in her thoughts and rolled her eyes at herself.  _Why do I always have to be this dramatic? It's not like he offered to hire me as a colleague or anything. I cannot even say when I'll see him again. If I see him again_ , she hastily corrected herself.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie is rather interested in the news.

When the former patients of Arkham Asylum made the news every day, Sophie had a hard time believing that this could be something actually happening.

She had seen the picture of a man called Hugo Strange on the news who would have looked like a friendly and compassionate doctor - hadn't it been for the glasses that seemed far too small for his round face and of course the headlines accusing him of experimenting on human DNA.

Sophie could not help feeling pity for the people who had not only been proclaimed dead, but also been put through torturing experiments. The thought that no one had missed them sent shivers down her spine. To her, these people were victims and she found it unfair and hurtful whenever she heard her colleagues or people on the streets referring to them as 'freaks'.

But when the penguin-man, Oswald Cobblepot, started to make appearances in the media, Sophie couldn't help the shift in her attitude.

While she disapproved of his whole agenda and felt disgusted by how he used the citizens' fear of the escapees to get the voters on his side, she knew that him being invested in that matter equalled Victor Zsasz being tangled up to some extent.

She had seen footage from some of the former patients. There was a woman who could move so incredibly fast that she didn't even leave a blur in the air.

Back in school, one of her teachers had been very enthusiastic about film and she could still remember his explanation: "You see, film consists of a frequency of images. Our brains need to see at least 16 frames in one second to perceive them as a fluid film. Anything less than 16 would merely be like looking at a handful of photographs quickly. Initially, everyone was satisfied with those 16 frames per second, but today, everything we see on TV runs with 24 frames per second."

Sophie had stayed glued to the TV after seeing the footage of that woman and skipped through the channels until she found another broadcast and managed to record it. Only when she slowed down the recording twice, she could see a blur.  _At least she's not teleporting._ Although Sophie had never been extraordinarily good at mathematics, common sense told her that if this woman was fast enough to beat a camera, she would be fast enough to beat a bullet.

There were rumours on the streets that one of the escapees could drain people of their youth through his touch, leaving behind corpses that looked like mummies. People said one of them looked like a vampire with bat-like wings and a thirst for blood.

As a child, Sophie had enjoyed the goose bumps on her skin that came with every ghost story her friends told her. As a teenager, she had enjoyed watching horror films, pretending to be unimpressed with all the gore in front of her friends and making fun of how the characters would always do the least logical thing.

Now, she could understand how Cobblepot's promise of "making Gotham safe again" was so appealing to the masses.

But Sophie was not concerned about her own safety. Why would they harm civilians, anyway? Their inbreaks into pharmaceutical establishments probably meant that they were either trying to 'cure' themselves from the effects of the experiments conducted on them or struggling with some kind of side-effects. Sophie could imagine that having their genetic material changed must have been awful enough. The thought that they might be still in pain after being 'transformed' deepened her feelings of sympathy.

She would not vote for someone who talked about "killing monsters" when she considered it the government's task to not overlook something as big and controversial as a mad scientist performing illegal experiments in the city's only psychiatry for the criminally insane.

What Sophie was concerned about was the safety of Victor Zsasz. In general, worrying about someone as lethal as Victor Zsasz seemed like a silly thing to do in more than one aspect.

There probably were a great deal of people to whom the death of Victor Zsasz would have fallen in the category of things for "making Gotham safe again", but Sophie saw herself far from ever being one of them by now. Other than that, she had witnessed the man's agility and skilfulness with a gun and his ridiculous ability to leave situations in which he had been outnumbered by large with merely a scratch.

But what if his boss put him up against these people with, well, super powers? Her brain bestowed her with countless images of Victor Zsasz being drained of his blood, youth, life, of someone turning up behind him, seemingly out of nowhere. From time to time, Sophie would jump awake from her sleep by the sound her mind imagined the bald man's pale neck to make when it was snapped by a figure so large it looked beyond human.

There probably wasn't anyone as interested in watching the news as she was. Before the dreams came and her nightmares mocked her with the hidden fears of her sub-conscious, Sophie had told herself that she was only fascinated by the paranormal aspects because she was a writer.

In fact, they had inspired her to add a couple of pages to her novel which had felt utterly satisfying. But after she had squeezed these pages out of her fingers, she still followed every news broadcast and the  _Gotham Gazette_ , as well as other papers, with a perseverance that came close to obsession.

And every day the headlines did not include any notions of a hitman being killed by an escapee left her with a feeling of relief.

At some point, Oswald Cobblepot had seemingly fulfilled his promise of freeing the city of the 'monsters' and Sophie had seen images of him in front of a bonfire in which the corpses of two dead escapes were burned. The penguin-man promised that the 'freaks' would not return to Gotham and thereafter became mayor elect.

The whole situation seemed absurd to Sophie. While she was convinced that every human being deserved a second chance, she could not quite picture the penguin-man, a former rather successful mobster, in the role of a political leader. A small part of her actually almost found it funny. She wondered how Victor Zsasz's conditions of employment would change.

 


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie attends a party.

It would be hard for Sophie to explain how she had gotten into this situation. And to be fair, it was Gina who had initiated the whole thing.

But Sophie knew that she should have said no, she knew that things weren't unlikely to escalate, and she felt that it was her responsibility to keep her friend away from potentially dangerous things, especially when they were in some way related to Victor Zsasz and his employer.

But Gina had insisted that it would be fun to attend the mayor's celebration party and somehow managed to get her hands of two tickets for the event. Furthermore, she had skilfully evaded all of Sophie's questions about their source. The latter suspected that her friend, while not living the life reserved for the creme de la crème of Gotham, might be secretly rich and simply preferred living a modest life that included a small apartment and working long hours.

Sophie was well aware that it was her curiosity or rather obsession with getting glimpses of Gotham's underworld and the people involved into it that had once again outweighed common sense. But the feeble excuse that she needed to yield to this obsession to be a better writer did not justify putting her friend in danger, too.

Yet, here they were, blending in in the club called  _The Sirens_ , sipping expensive drinks and listening to talented artists performing life music. Despite her limited experience, Sophie really wasn't a fan of rich people's parties. While the purple attire of the dimly lit club looked classy and the band was doing a great job, no one seemed to really have a good time. Even the young teenagers she had made out in the crowd did not look like they enjoyed herself. Gina seemed disappointed with the fact that nobody was dancing and quickly excused herself to have a smoke and promised to be back for the mayor's speech.

Sophie took the time to tend to her drink in one of the darker areas of the club and made sure to more or less hide behind a couple that could not keep their hands of each other and caused most of the other guests to look away shamefully. Once she considered herself out of sight, she scanned the room for familiar faces.

The penguin-man was like a whirlwind, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with everyone that looked important. He seemed genuinely happy and when he came into hearing distance, Sophie noted that he was both rather eloquent and polite. Fortunately, her strategy worked, and she did not have to make up an excuse for being where she was. When the mayor threw a glance in her direction, his gaze became fixed on the kissing couple and he quickly turned away to chat with other people.  _Did he just blush?_  Perhaps it was the alcohol, but Sophie could not help grinning at the thought.

Interestingly, Sophie could have sworn that she saw the former bartender of  _Oswald's_  cross the room at some point which vastly fuelled her curiosity. Maybe he and the penguin-man simply remained friends after the club had shut down. But that explanation seemed too simple to her. It seemed far more likely that the man who had once worked for the mobster still worked for him after he became mayor.

With some disappointment, she realized that Victor Zsasz was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she had misjudged Oswald Cobblepot. Maybe he  _had_  become a righteous man and cut all ties to his former life as a criminal. Maybe his former barkeeper had simply remained by his side as a friend. Maybe Victor Zsasz had found a new employer now that his old boss was an elected political figure. But Sophie didn't really believe that. Probably because she didn't want to believe it.

Her thoughts were interrupted when the band started clearing the stage after their last song and the guests of  _The Sirens_  who had been talking loudly before became less and less noisy. Their conversations died away when a blond woman in a purple dress entered the stage and announced that the " _saviour from the monsters and the captain of our city_ " was about to give his speech. Sophie couldn't help but suspect an ounce of sarcasm in her voice, yet the woman's wide smile did not falter.

When Sophie let her gaze wander around the room, Gina was nowhere to be seen. Instead, she noticed that a bald individual had appeared in a corner, and, much to her dismay, her heart skipped a beat.

Sophie slowly took a few steps towards the bar in the middle of the room, so she could get a better view of him. She witnessed him exchanging a look with a tall man wearing glasses and giving him a nod.  _Isn't that the mayor's chief of staff?_

When the man with the glasses turned back to the stage, Victor Zsasz's face which had been expressionless before produced a crooked smile.

It was this smile that made Sophie believe something bad was about to happen. She knew that smile. It had been on his face when she met him before he burnt down her beloved café, it had been on his face before he went on a killing spree in the  _Canzuncella._  It was a smile that sent a shiver down her spine. Instead of paying attention to her new mayor, she focused on his hitman.

She didn't have to wait long to find out. She watched as Victor's eyes merrily followed a bulky figure wearing a red hood that had emerged from the crowd right next to him. Sophie furrowed her brow. This didn't make any sense.  _I thought the red hood gang was dead?_

While the bald man idly watched the more-than-potential threat firing shots into the air, the mayor's chief of staff had made his way onto the stage where he awkwardly held the penguin-man in place instead of dragging him away.

Only after it became apparent that the man had been firing blanks at Cobblepot, the chief of staff loosened his grip on him and Victor Zsasz finally started moving and shot the hooded man in the leg while grinning malevolently.

With squinted eyes, Sophie looked from Zsasz to the man with the glasses.  _Nygma_ , she remembered his name and wondered if she had just witnessed the most obvious set-up in the history of set-ups.

Yet, everyone else, including the mayor elect, seemed shocked that Butch Gilzean would try to murder his employer and did not question the fact that his attempt had included the use of blank ammunition. Nor did anyone seem to wonder why Nygma would drag the mayor within the shooter's range instead of onto the floor.

Maybe it was the alcohol, but a part of her found that weirdly amusing.

She couldn't help shaking her head, but was quickly pulled out of her thoughts, when another woman who was violently dragging a man to the stage, came into the picture and dropped said man off its edge. Sophie couldn't keep herself from flinching when she saw the knife sticking in the man's back.

Seconds later, Butch Gilzean used the given distraction and sheer physical force to not only disarm the bald man, but to also thrown him behind the bar's counter, before he made his way towards Nygma in an attempt to strangle him.

The drama in front of her which had caught everyone else breathless (or highly amused in the case of the blond woman on stage), ceased to interest Sophie who hurried towards the bar to examine the figure who apparently had passed out. In different circumstances, the image could have been funny. It was hard to imagine Victor Zsasz gracelessly lying in a puddle of booze.

The bartenders seemed too scared to approach the bald man, so Sophie rushed behind the counter, pushed one of the young men aside, and, without a second thought, crouched down next to Victor Zsasz and grabbed his wrist. With her own heart beating this fast, it was hard to tell, but his pulse seemed to be steady and there was no visible head injury, so she allowed herself to relax.

Sophie was aware that the barkeeper looked at her like she was crazy, so she gave him a glare that must have been mean enough to send him away. Once she felt unwatched, she started to gently brush some shards of glass off the hitman's face and suit. His pale face almost looked peaceful. It seemed weird to her that the men behind the bar were terrified by him even when he was unconscious.

Slowly, the clenching feeling in her chest started to dissolve, yet her pulse didn't slow down as much as she would have liked it to. But that was probably normal. She had just seen people get shot and stabbed- and she was touching a murderer.

The wailing of police sirens made her come back to her senses, so she tore her eyes and hand away from his features.  _I need to work on my impulse control. And boundaries. Boundaries are important. And I should drink less alcohol in the future._

She was sure that Victor Zsasz wouldn't be happy if he ever found out that she had dared to touch his face.

After one last glance, Sophie got up and left the club to look for Gina. Outside, she only had to follow the peculiar smell that had spread from her friend's hand-rolled cigarette. It would be best if they vanished before the police came.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie makes a friend.

 

> _Is there anything you would love to do if there were no consequences?_
> 
> _Whenever I see a pyramid of cans in a super market, I inwardly fight the urge to push it over. So, I'd definitely give that a try._

* * *

This time, she didn't have to wait long for their next encounter.

It was a tough day at work. By now, Sophie had gotten used to the steamy heat of the kitchen and she could have sworn that the work here also made her a lot more coordinated and quicker than any job she ever had before. The tension that was brought by working under time pressure usually got dissolved by the loud and good-humoured chatter of her colleagues. But today, even those who usually filled the room with loud laughter were strained by the stress. Three people were on sick leave and apparently, their restaurant had appeared particularly attractive to customers this day.

Sophie had thought that it couldn't have gotten any worse and really looked forward to clocking off. As ever so often, the universe decided to prove her otherwise.

While she was solely focused on cutting symmetrical slices of tomatoes as fast as she could, an armed man in a suit stormed in and shouted at them to leave.

Sophie tilted her head and crooked an eyebrow at him while the rest of her colleagues seemed as unimpressed by the disturbance as she was. She actually felt a twinge of pride for herself. Not being terrified by armed men seemed to be one of the characteristics of a true Gothamite.

Here, a gun seemingly wasn't enough to inspire fear. Most citizens were almost used to the crime and criminals around them. To scare them, the person holding the weapon needed to be terrifying. Sophie caught herself thinking of how Victor Zsasz had caused everyone to leave by merely entering the room when she was still working in that coffee shop.

This man, however, did not seem intimidating to her or anyone else, apparently. So, Sophie chose to ignore him and shifted her attention back to the tomatoes.

Only a second later, the sound of machine guns rang through the room. This, of course, was a different calibre in more than one way. The least impressive person can be utterly terrifying with a machine gun. The two women in a rather punkish attire were trying to shoot the man, not seeming to care much about collateral damage, and definitely inspiring fear. With the sound of her colleagues' screams in her ears, Sophie threw herself to the floor and started moving towards the other exit.

Along with the others, Sophie half crawled, and half ran towards their way out and while everyone else did not slow down after they had exited the room, the sound of a far too familiar voice made her stop.

_"_ _It's an inevitability, Jim!"_

Sophie let out a groan.  _Speaking of the devil._   _Or rather thinking._  She dragged away the fact that too many of her thoughts revolved around Victor Zsasz and, with her back now pressed against the closed door, continued to eavesdrop. Not that any of the sounds were hard to overhear.

After the fire of machine guns had been replaced by the sound ordinary guns make, the two men had seemingly resolved to physical violence. At least Sophie could have sworn that it would sound exactly like this if a man's head was hit by a pan or another metal object repeatedly. It almost sounded the way it did in the cartoons she used to watch as a kid.

She started biting her lower lip. Due to what she had witnessed the last time she saw him, Sophie was sure that the bald man wasn't as good in a fistfight as he was when it came to firearms. His forte seemed to lie in agility and not in brute strength.

While Sophie was aware of the fact that it was morally wrong to root for the perpetrator, especially in a situation like this, she just couldn't help hoping that he would come out of this unharmed. In an ideal world, both men would be alright. But Sophie knew that Victor Zsasz was not likely to stop until the job was finished. For his target to survive, he would need to be stopped- and that would only be achieved by his own death. And that was something Sophie did not want to occur.

She should have walked away from this, but her curiosity was stronger.  _The kind of curiosity that kills cats._  Carefully, she sneaked back into the room she had fled from and took in the scene.

Victor was hitting the other man's head with a tray.

So, she hadn't been wrong about the metal object, and inwardly congratulated herself on her perceptiveness. However, he did not keep the upper hand for very long; from one second to the next, the other man had him in a headlock only to send him to the floor with a kick in the solar plexus.

She let out a hissing sound by inhaling through gritted teeth.  _That must have hurt_. She hoped that none of his internal organs were damaged.

With Zsasz being knocked out, she expected the other man to leave. Instead, he reached for the gun on the counter and aimed it at the unconscious figure.

Her insides turned into ice.

Sophie opened her mouth to scream at the man, to tell him to stop, but everything that came out was a pathetic sound that was far too quiet to be heard by the man. His hand pulled the trigger and-

Nothing happened.

With the empty gun still in his hand, the man walked out the same door he had come to and Sophie shakily hurried towards the bald man.

"Just how often do you get knocked out, Victor?", she asked the person laying on the ground with a sigh. The rush of adrenaline and the fact that he was breathing made her feel almost light-headed.

Getting down beside him, Sophie inspected the man for further damage. There was bruise forming on his left cheek bone, but it did not look too bad. He had probably dished out more than he had taken in- except for that hit in the solar plexus. Despite having passed out, the man was breathing heavily, and Sophie hoped that it was more from exertion than from pain.

She wasn't sure what to do. It was very likely that one of her co-workers had called the police by now who would soon walk in to find two dead women and a knocked-out assassin.

Sophie didn't want him to be arrested and she hated herself for it.  _Murderers belong to prison, so they can no longer harm others and be rehabilitated._ As rational as it sounded, it still didn't suffice for her.

When he had been at her flat, Sophie remembered, he had taken out his phone and texted people to pick him up. With a trembling hand, she reached inside his vest, painfully aware of his heartbeat, found his phone in one of the inside pockets and flipped it open.

_No pin code._  Either this man was very confident that no one would ever dare to touch something as personal as his phone or he had very little care for privacy.

Opening his list of contacts, Sophie was quickly met with a dilemma. Which number should she call? Or should she text? Under 'B', there were two entries: "Boss" and "Boss (1)", each having a different number. Neither Oswald Cobblepot's name nor nickname were anywhere to be found.

Sophie didn't have the guts to call any number whatsoever and quickly sent a text to boss (1), assuming it to be his employer's more recent number, and informing him that Victor Zsasz and two bodies required being picked up at her restaurant's address.

About five seconds later, the phone rang.

With a long exhale to calm her nerves, Sophie picked up the call.

"Yes?" she asked, far too high-pitched to conceal her nervousness.

"Who are you?" She was pretty sure it was the mayor's voice and ignored the question. It would be best if no one influential knew who she was.

Instead, she said: "He needs to be picked up before the police-" but did not get to finish her sentence. "Let me ask you again, young lady. Who are you?"

Sophie hesitated. "I am a friend of Victor's." The person on the other end of the line seemed to be as surprised of that statement as she was herself. During the awkward silence that followed, Sophie wondered how many people would call themselves Victor Zsasz's friends.

"Right", the voice interrupted her thoughts, "I'll send someone. But if you prove to have lied, there will be severe consequences." Sophie nodded, forgetting that he could not see that, and then hurried to say "Of course, thank you", before he hung up the phone.

When she made an attempt to put the phone back into the bald man's vest, his sudden firm grip on her wrist almost gave her a heart-attack. With a clenched jaw and furrowed brows, Victor Zsasz looked at her in a way that suggested he wanted to know what she had done with his phone.

"You've been unconscious for a couple of minutes. I took your phone and talked to the mayor. He will send someone to pick you up. Are you okay?" She rattled off, almost stumbling over the words.

The assassin gave a short nod, before letting his head sink back on the floor and closing his eyes. While his one hand clutched at the area just below his rib cage, his other remained on Sophie's wrist, though with a much lighter grip, as if he had forgotten about it.

She allowed it to remain there and put her hand down to one of her knees. She told herself that she didn't mind it, but a part of her enjoyed being touched by Victor Zsasz, even if it was through gloved hands, far too much for her own good.

Remaining seated down where she was, Sophie became aware of how she was invading his personal space, how she could feel the contact his hand that was still around her wrist made contact with a part of her leg though the fabric of her –  _Focus,_ she commanded herself _._

"Why are you here?" he eventually asked, bringing her back down to earth. Sophie hesitated for a moment, before letting out a short laugh. "I work here." She could have sworn that he had grinned for a second.

"What are you doing here? Who was that man?"

"Work. James Gordon of the GCPD.", he answered expressionlessly.

Sophie blinked. She couldn't believe that the mayor would order a hit on a policeman.

"Why does he have to die? What did he do?"

"Upsetting the wrong people."

"But he's with the police, and he seemed concerned to get everyone out of the line of fire before you came in here…"

"Jim's a good guy", he stated matter-of-factly.

"Um, you like him?"

"Yes." Still no expression.

"And you'd still… kill him?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Business is business."

Sophie decided against an argument about how while killing people in general was wrong, killing people you like was even worse.

"So, what did James Gordon do to upset the mayor?

"He didn't upset penguin. Someone else gave the order."

_I thought he only works for Cobblepot?_ "Who?"

Instead of an answer, Victor Zsasz grinned, gave a slight shake of the head and closed his eyes again. She wouldn't pry any more information out of him today.

When he heard her sigh, the bald man finally let his arm slip from her wrist and started to slowly rise from the ground.

"You should leave before they come for the clean-up", he suggested, indifferently gesturing towards one of the dead women in the corner of the room that Sophie had avoided looking at.

Sophie had actually forgotten about them. The thought made her flinch.  _Am I becoming so cold that I don't even care about people dying in the same room?_  Yet, she was interested in who they were and how they had come to work with him.

Instead of asking more questions, Sophie nodded and did what he suggested. While leaving the man and the bloody mess behind, she could not help wondering if Victor Zsasz would put her in the category of people he "liked" and if it would mean anything if he did.

Consumed by her dark thoughts, she didn't pay any attention and never took notice of the car far too fancy for this neighbourhood parked opposite to the restaurant.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ”The kind of curiosity that kills cats” is a sentence used by Neil Gaiman in his wonderful poem “The White Road” which I strongly recommend – as well as anything else this author has ever written.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie enjoys a starry night.

Things were going pretty well for Sophie. Due to some miracle, her workplace would only be shut down for two days in which the GCPD fruitlessly searched for evidence but found no traces of DNA. As nobody but Sophie had seen the corpses of the women with the machine guns, no one seemed to be aware of their deaths.

Sophie had never thought to be happy about something as gloomy as a murder case not even being opened. Just once did she wonder if anyone would miss the dead women, if they had anyone waiting for them at home. Yet, she quickly suppressed any worries about how her ability to empathize seemed to be slowly going down the drain. What she could not suppress was her thoughts' increasing inclination to drift towards the bald assassin whenever there was no other task at hand occupying her mind.

It felt like an accomplishment to have kept a job despite a visit of Victor Zsasz.

But while she felt rather smug about that, she also wondered how her 'friend's' hunt for James Gordon would turn out. The death of a policeman would have been scandalous enough to make the headlines, especially if it was someone as heroic as this one was according to hearsay.

Sophie was aware of how morally questionable it was for her to watch the news in hopes of hearing about the death of a policeman. But once again, she concluded that this would be the preferred outcome for her.

_I don't have any kind of relationship with that cop. But I do know Victor to some extent, it's only natural that I don't want anyone I know dead._

With her eyes glued on the TV during her time off, Sophie did not catch anything coming up about James Gordon. Instead, she could witness a rather interesting interview that was being conducted with the penguin-man.

Oswald Cobblepot, Gotham's mayor and man of the people, who had seemed like a social butterfly with polished manners to her, was not cutting a good figure at this interview.

Ages ago, Sophie remembered, she had wondered if this man carried kindness in his eyes. Now that this interview provided her with a close-up, she still couldn't tell.

Frankly, the man looked as if he had just seen a ghost. There was sweat on his brow and it even looked as if there was a speck of blood on one of his cheeks. In an attempt to take a sip from his drink, he spilled water on himself. Moreover, he did a fairly bad job at evading questions concerning his criminal record and actually failed to deny murder allegations. It seemed as if he had forgotten his talent for eloquence and his charisma at home.

The highlight, however, was when he jumped out of his seat, knocked over his water for good, and voiced out how he felt about the citizens of his fair city.

"To hell with the people!"

Still being not too keen on the politician, Sophie was actually enjoying this more than she was proud to admit.

* * *

When she got back to work, it was hard for her to believe that the kitchen had been a crime scene only a couple of days ago. Everything looked spotless and while the first couple of hours had been a bit awkward, her colleagues soon returned to their usual loud chatter and shenanigans.

Bill, one of her co-workers who was rather gifted when it came to imitating people, would jump up and shout "to hell with you people!" whenever someone would address him, be it a waiter passing on an order or one of the other kitchen helps asking him to hand them a spatula, making them all burst with laughter.

Maybe, everyone had somewhat bounded a bit more by cheating death together. Or it had taught them to take life less seriously for a while. Whatever it was, their good mood was more contagious than ever, and Sophie felt really glad to be back. She didn't  _love_  this job, but she surely loved the way they all got along with each other.

On her way home, she was humming happily, the sound of their laughter still in her head, and smiling widely over her colleagues' silliness. It was nice how small and mundane things could distract her mind from the darker areas it had seemed to prefer lately.

At home, Sophie decided to treat herself to some banana pancakes. Not that she counted calories, but she usually tried to eat as healthy as she could afford to. Since she'd been living in a city this polluted, she felt the urge to meet her mother's expectations of a healthy lifestyle at least partially.

She made about a dozen pancakes and decided to devour as many of them as she could tonight and have the rest for breakfast. After the news, she decided, she would watch a movie or finally finish the book she was reading.

But when she settled on the couch and turned the TV on, her appetite quickly faded away.

On the screen was a young man whose face looked… wrong. As if it had been cut off and stapled back on. Yet, there was something undeniably intriguing about the young man, some sort of boyish charm that had remained intact even when his face had not.

Even more disturbing than his looks were his words. Sophie listened as the red-haired man talked about how he had been revived from the dead. But not like someone who came back shortly after a cardiac arrest.

He claimed that he had been dead for a year.

And now he was encouraging the viewers to use this night for doing whatever they wanted. In fact, he was encouraging them to murder people.

Sophie could not help but notice how happy he looked while saying those terrible things. Mesmerised, she stared at him.

Only when the red-haired man turned away to retrieve a lighter from another man tied to a chair, Sophie registered the explosives behind him.

Just like she hadn't been able to look away from the crazy man's stapled face, she now could not tear her eyes from the one of the victim he left behind.

Her feeling of nausea increased as she watched the man's last moments broadcasted on television. The way his pupils dilated and his body was shaking once he realized his fate was sealed. The sheer panic on his face and how time seemed to stop a moment before his death. Sophie wondered whether watching someone in a situation this terrible was even worse than experiencing it yourself while the image on the television screen became engraved on her memory forever.

Then, many things seemed to happen at once.

Sophie heard the sound of an explosion. And a split-second later, all the lights turned out, and the city became silent at once.

The calm lasted for several heartbeats in which Sophie made her way to the window to look at the burning building on the other side of the river.

The image was both terrifying and strangely beautiful. The flames contrasted to the night that was so much darker than any she had ever seen before. With the power and the streetlights off, you could even see the stars.

 


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie engages in small talk.

Her windows would have needed cleaning.

Sophie wasn’t sure if it was the exhaust fumes or if the rain in this city was somehow dirtier than rain was supposed to be, but if she had cared for something as mundane as a hundred percent clear view to the outside world, she would have needed to clean her windows every two weeks.

Despite the almost grey film that stuck to the other side of the glass, Sophie found the view in front of her sublime.

With her forehead pressed against the cold glass, she stared into the darkness and realized that she had never seen the city this quiet. The filter of dirt did not obstruct her view on the outside world and the contrast the bright orange flames build to the blackness of the night. It was as if time had stopped, there was no movement on the streets, no sound of running engines or honking drivers. For once, the city that never slept had come to a halt.

The calm before the storm would only last for a couple of heart beats.

In less than a minute, the chaos broke out and spread like cancer. 

There were cars burning only a block away, accompanied by the nasty noise of alarms blazing, and she could distinctly hear people shouting in the distance.

It was the sound of screaming that ripped Sophie out of her trance and made her come back to her senses. The man on TV had told the people of Gotham to break the law, to attack and kill each other.

And apparently, Gotham had listened.

With too much force, she hastily closed the curtains, almost tearing them down, hurried to her door, locked it twice from the inside and put up the door chain.

Although the power wasn’t working, she still flicked every light switch off, so that in case the electricity went back on, there would be no light in her apartment to attract uninvited guests.

In the darkness, she sat back on the sofa and pulled her blanket tightly around her trembling frame. Was it her or had the temperature dropped?

The bedroom wasn’t an option. She would have to sit this out in her living room where she would hear if anyone was trying to get through the front door.

Besides, Sophie doubted that she would be able to sleep tonight. She was scared.

Sitting in the dark did not really help with that sentiment, so she decided that it wouldn’t hurt to light a candle to at least cast the shadowy thoughts in her mind away.

On the kitchen counter, her pancakes were slowly getting cold. But she had lost her appetite anyway.

* * *

 

Sophie had intended to stay awake for the whole night or at least until the energy went back on and everything was over. But apparently, the long day at work and the rush of adrenaline had taken its toll on her body so that she, despite all efforts, hadn’t been able to keep her eyes open.

When she came to her senses, her body was once again flooded by a new wave of adrenaline.

The candle must have gone out hours ago and the drawn curtains kept most of the light that the chaos and the moon outside created out of her apartment, so she had to wait for her eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness.

Despite still being dizzy, she felt that something was wrong, and of course her heart rate hurried to express her anxiety. Sophie had a feeling that she wasn’t alone.

Her eyes darted through the room, frantically searching for someone that wasn’t supposed to be there. She intently listened for any form of movement, but Sophie couldn’t hear anything but her own heartbeat. _I’m probably just paranoid, I’m probably just paranoid, I’m probably just -_

But once she warily sat up, she was greeted by a mocking voice behind her.

“Hiho.”

At some point, this man would give her a heart attack.

“Fucking hell.”

With a mixture of supressed rage and shock, Sophie slowly turned around to look at Victor Zsasz who had apparently entered her flat without making a sound and was now nonchalantly standing in her kitchen.

And eating her pancakes.

“Victor.” She breathed out exasperatedly, trying to mask her shock.

“Hm?” he asked innocently.

“What are you doing here?”

“Oh. I was just in the neighbourhood. Passing by.”

It had been a while since she had seen him as his usual smug self. She didn’t bother answering and focused on calming down instead.

He gestured towards the pancakes “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Help yourself” she replied dryly.

He looked content while eating her food and, of course, unfazed by the fact that hell had broken loose in the city. Sophie could imagine too well how he would walk through the streets, through the chaos of people killing each other, feeling invincible. _Being_ invincible.

Once her heartrate normalised, she actually felt glad to have a murderer in her apartment. If anyone else decided to break into her home, there was already an intruder here who would be likely much worse.

“So, a blackout must be a major inconvenience for an assassin?” she asked, trying to engage into some absurd version of small talk.

The way he frowned and bit his lower lip while contemplating his answer looked somewhat childish to her.

“It helps with doing things undetected. But not if you want to get a message across.” The way he said _undetected_ somehow sent a shiver down her spine. This was better than normal small talk anyway.

“Ah. So you’re taking the night off?” Sophie was slightly proud at how laid-back she sounded. 

“Uh-huh. Traffic’s a bit tough, so I thought I might crash here.”

_He is such a blunt liar,_ Sophie thought and inwardly rolled her eyes. Admittedly, they were both beating around the bush. She with trying to give the impression of having nerves made of steel and him with… whatever he was trying to pull off. It wasn’t unlikely that she would never be able to read this man and unravel his intentions.

While this irritated her to no ends, she still could not imagine a parallel universe in which he would give her a serious answer if she asked him why he came. So instead of arguing, she let it go and allowed him to stay.

Of course, Victor Zsasz would never seriously ask if anyone was alright with whatever he proposed to them. Yet, Sophie did not feel annoyed for too long. With the intimidating figure in her apartment, felt safe.

* * *

 

_No one else, neither her friends nor the adults, appeared to see the changes. If they had looked closer, they might have noticed that the colour of Joice’s eyes had become a few shades darker and her skin a couple of degrees colder. They could have noticed how the neighbour’s puppy that had once jumped with joy whenever Joice was close, did no longer allow her to pet it. They could have noticed that she did not enjoy playing as much as she used to before._ _Some days, she would look in the mirror and not recognize herself. But to everyone else, Joice still seemed to look herself._

* * *

 

She should have just offered him a blanket, a pillow – and her couch, of course – before retreating into her bedroom and getting some well-deserved rest. But instead, Sophie decided that she should take advantage of this encounter and perhaps exert some information out of the bald man who was still leaning against her kitchen counter.

Moreover, the assassin was looking at her intently while eating the treat she had made for herself, most certainly to make her nervous. She did not want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her uncomfortable, so talking seemed to be a good way to dissolve the awkwardness.

“You know, during the mayor’s party at _The Sirens_ , I couldn’t help but realize that Butch Gilzean has a nasty scar on his forehead…” she began.

“Hmm.” He hummed with a mean grin, supposedly affirmatively.

“Did you ever realize that his scar looks like a ‘V’?” Sophie asked innocently. She had a feeling that the two men must have had some kind of history.

“Oh? What a coincidence.” His voice was dripping sarcasm and the grin on his face widened noticeably.

“Do you happen to have anything to do with that?” She wasn’t sure why, but she wanted to hear him say it. Maybe hearing him confess to doing anything would be something she could interpret as trust. Maybe there would be a shadow of regret traceable in his voice. Or maybe she just wanted to add more pieces to a puzzle that seemed to have an infinite number of parts.

“Why do you want to know that?” he retorted, the grin, along with all other expression, suddenly gone from his face

“I have some theories.” She said, once again trying to sound cool and detached, “about what you do, for whom, and why.”

She decided to leave it at that. He didn’t need to know that he was an enigma to her and that she had no idea what was going on in the darker parts of Gotham which were supposedly his working environment.

While she was certain that the mayor’s influence wasn’t restricted to Gotham’s ‘respected’ citizens and he still played a major role in the city’s criminal realms, Sophie had no idea _why_ Victor Zsasz was ordered to do the things he did. Maybe she was in the wrong by assuming that he only committed crimes when ordered to, who knew what he enjoyed doing in his spare time?

And of course, she only witnessed a fraction of the hitman’s deeds. So, with only knowing fragments of the ‘what’ and only one of potentially numerous employers, there was really no way for her to really come up with a profound theory.

“You seem to be good with theories.” He purred. Sophie managed not to scoff.

So he _was_ responsible for the scar on the barkeeper’s forehead. She nodded thoughtfully, ignoring the way he was still staring at her.

“And why would you set poor Butch up like this after having already engraved half of your initials on his face?” Sophie almost flinched when she realized how mean the words had sounded. She wasn’t heartless. She really felt bad for the bartender.

The coldness of her words was rewarded by a low chuckle. Yet he did not answer her question.

Sophie rolled her eyes at him and shifted into a more comfortable position on her couch, finally looking away from Victor Zsasz and rubbing her neck.

It didn’t take long for the man to finish the rest of her food and get comfortable on the chair opposite to her. Sophie told herself that she was glad that he had not tried to sit next to her and remembered how close she had sat next to him the last time she saw him – and how it had messed with her ability to focus.

Staying sharp seemed important when engaging into conversation with him when he was supposedly in his top form.

“I take it we’re not talking about Butch’s set-up then?” she crooked her head as well as one eye-brow while maintaining eye contact with him.

“Maybe another time.” He didn’t even sound evasive, just bored.

“Alright.” She paused for a couple of seconds before asking “How is James Gordon doing?”

As she was sure that the policeman was still alive, Sophie had sort of anticipated that bringing up the topic and thus confronting him with a failed hit would have ruined the mood. So when Victor Zsasz’s face expressed something that could only be insufficiently described as childish joy, Sophie had trouble hiding her bewilderment.

_Is he dead?_

“He’s _fine_.” He explained, extending the vocal in such a way that Sophie wasn’t certain if he spoke the truth, “the hit got called off.”

_Huh._ Sophie felt relieved, she really would have been shaken if the policeman who had seemed so righteous and tried to keep her and her colleagues out of harm’s way was dead. This probably also meant that Gordon would not kill Victor anytime soon.

“Oh, good. I’m glad to hear that.” She answered lamely.

He looked at her questioningly with narrowed eyes.

“I mean, you said you liked him. Would have been a shame.” _If you had killed him._

He just gave her a shrug and a crooked eyebrow.

_Yeah, good talk._ Sophie thought sarcastically. She wondered if Victor Zsasz had anyone whose death would upset him.

Her musings were interrupted by a loud crash and several voices screaming through the dark.

She had to hand it to Victor Zsasz; a conversation with him could distract her from the hell that had broken loose outside of her apartment.

For a split second, the room was illuminated by an orange light. Apparently, another car had exploded right on her street.

Suddenly the screaming had subsided- along with Sophie’s ability to keep cool. The assassin must have noticed her trembling before she did.

“Relax”, he muttered before moving towards the window and opening the curtains to take in the scenery in front of him. Whatever he saw must have amused him. Sophie could have sworn to hear him mumble ‘amateurs’.

When he turned around to scrutinize her again, she gave him a faint smile. _If he is even half as skilled as he is arrogant, I am the safest person in Gotham right now._

To further distract herself from the death and destruction outside, she decided to pick up a new conversation topic.

“What do you think about all _this_?” she asked him while vaguely gesturing towards the window behind him.

“It seems fun.” He said with his eyes still fixed on whatever was happening outside. “But only temporarily.”

“You don’t like the prospect of _everyone_ killing other people?” She cursed herself for not being able to keep her mouth shut.

As always, he appeared to be unfazed by her words. Perhaps even as much as he was by the violence that had erupted outside. Maybe she didn’t need to worry about going too far with the things she said. It seemed only fair that she shouldn’t need to be walking on eggshells around someone whose demeanour was usually insensitive or plain rude.

After a moment of contemplation, he turned to look at her to answer.

“I enjoy what I do, and I am good at my work. The job includes rules, a structure. This – “, he shrugged his shoulders dismissively, “- is chaos.”

Sophie could not think of any sensible way to answer this. Society’s basic rules like ‘not killing people’ seemed like something well-structured and reasonable to her. They were what enabled people to live together peacefully.

In a binary system, everything outside of the common order would be considered chaos. She had assumed that there would some kind of unpredictable madness hidden behind Victor Zsasz’s unreadable facial expression and weird social etiquette. Imagining that he had simply abandoned society’s order and chosen a new set of rules for himself made the whole case more complex. She would have loved to learn about his codex, to find out if there was any kind of morale in this man.

“I assume you are not a fan of the red-haired gentleman to whom we owe the blackout, then?”

“I don’t care about him. He’s just a clown.”

It wasn’t long until the intervals between her yawns had become so short that it could be considered rude. Yet, Sophie forced herself to stay awake a bit longer and waited until the bald man displayed his first sign of tiredness.

She had once read that yawning could be used as a test to determine if someone likes you, given that they yawn shortly after you do. If this was accurate, she wondered if it counted that he had started yawning one hour after her.

_Stop being pathetic. Be mature,_ she instructed herself, before finally getting up to get him a pillow and a blanket.

“Thanks” he said almost enthusiastically as she placed the folded quilt on the armrest and attempted to put the pillow down in a way that looked either pretty or professional- or at least not clumsy.

It was the first time he had ever said _Thanks_ to her. And that not even in a sarcastic manner. Sophie chose to cherish that. With a smile on her face, she said goodnight and closed the door of her bedroom behind her.

* * *

 

After she had slept soundly until it was almost noon, the first thing she realized was that the light on her nightstand could be flicked back on. The energy was working again.

Feeling excited, she stepped into the living room to share the good news- only to find it deserted. The folded blanket and the pillow were still where she had placed them last night - unmoved and apparently untouched.


	24. Chapter 24

It was impressive what one night without rules could do to a city and its inhabitants. Sophie had left the house that morning after the incident and roamed the streets more or less aimlessly, taking in what has happened and gaping at the destruction around her like a child.

She wasn’t the only one who wandered around and stared at the broken shop windows and winced at the sound the shattered glass made under their feet. In the course of an hour, she saw at least a dozen burnt-out cars and even a couple of houses that looked like they had been set on fire. The smoke that still hung in the air made her throat sore and her stomach feel hollow.

The other people who had come out to examine the damage that had been done to their city walked with the same hanging shoulders, carrying an air of confusion and despair around them. The aloofness on some of their faces was betrayed by the shock that was evident in their wide eyes.

Sophie saw and old couple talking to a police officer that looked like she hadn’t slept for days. The grey-haired woman looked right through the member of the police force with empty eyes while her husband, who seemed to be on the verge of crying, almost shouted at the officer. It sounded as if they were missing their child or grandchild.

She remembered what Victor Zsasz had said about this: _It seems fun._

Sophie wondered if she would ever understand how an outlook on life could classify this as fun.

Feeling a heavy pang of guilt in her chest that she couldn’t quite understand, she quickly averted her eyes from the miserable couple and the pitiful policewoman and went back home into her apartment, where she could once again close the curtains and feel safe.

* * *

After the blackout, things in Gotham seemed to become crazier than ever. It was as if one night of darkness had resembled the crossing of an invisible barrier that had been intact before. At least that was how Sophie felt.

Although the days were getting warmer, the atmosphere in the streets remained cold. It was as if the rays of the sun couldn’t reach as far as they should, leaving everything just a bit darker than it was supposed to be. It took a couple of weeks to fix everything that had been broken and to clean up the mess that had been left on the streets. But while things were quickly repaired in every technical sense, Sophie couldn’t help but feel that the city didn’t _heal_.

The craziness after the chaos had started rather slowly. A minor incident, at least for Gotham’s standards, was that Oswald Cobblepot had disappeared under very curious circumstances. A not so minor incident was that he was declared dead soon after. Moreover, the criminal whom the newspapers called “The Riddler” had turned out to be the mayor’s chief of staff – and it was also rumoured that he had killed his former employer.

While Sophie wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that the mayor was dead, she was rather surprised to discover that someone like Edward Nygma, whose set-up back at the mayor’s party had been horrendous, was able to design riddles as complex as the papers described them to be. The fact that he did not waste a lot of time before he targeted and kidnapped the then reinstated mayor Aubrey James led Sophie to believe that he might have had something to do with the death of Janice Caulfield and the hit on Randall Hobbs.

Perhaps she had underestimated Edward Nygma. Perhaps there was a great scheme behind all of this that all led back to him and only made sense for someone who was as brilliant or as insane as he seemed to be. For Sophie, it didn’t.

There was also another thing she wondered about. _For whom is Victor working now? Could it be that he had been working for Nygma all along?_

The papers, however, didn’t publish anything that would indicate that the bald hitman was doing anything gruesome and thus worthy of attention. There were no articles about traceless murders.

What she had read about was that the former captain of the GCPD - who had turned insane as well – was on the loose. But unlike Nygma, who seemed to have the ambition of becoming a super-villain, he appeared to consider himself a righteous vigilante.

After weeks of feeling confused about everything that was happening around her, she had, at some point, just given up. The overload of bad news, followed by worse news simply made her tired. The unpredictability and the insanity of this city were just too much for her to constantly take in. As a result, she had stopped.

She had stopped reading the newspaper every morning, she had stopped watching the news twice a day, she had stopped talking about the most recent political developments with her co-workers. Instead, she tried to fill the silence in her apartment with music and films - and the void in her mind with literature.

It was strange that sealing herself off from all the bad news felt so liberating.

Not worrying about the things she’d probably never understand, not worrying about the bigger picture any longer calmed her inner turmoil to an extent she would not have thought possible. Her nerves which had been on edge slowly but steadily started to calm down.

Feeling a twinge of conscience, she thought about her parents who always followed the news every day, their discussions at the dinner table, and how disappointed they would be if they knew that their daughter had abandoned their tradition. But whilst the politicians of her hometown discussed things like renovating the city hall or building a new bus stop, the politicians of this city were murdered.

While she had stopped occupying her mind with what was going on in Gotham, she had not been able to stop the appearances of Victor Zsasz in her dreams. But what had once filled her with a bad conscience, she now started to accept.

So what if he was a bad person. The night of the blackout had shown her that she was surrounded by horrible people. The extent to which she was interested in horrible things probably indicated what an awful person she was herself.

Not all heroes wear capes, and not all bad people commit crimes.

Sophie wanted to believe that the bald hitman’s explanation that his nightly visit was induced by the fact that he had been in the neighbourhood was nothing but a downright lie. She wanted to believe that he came to ensure that she wasn’t killed. If this was the case and Victor Zsasz cared about another human being, it would mean that he wasn’t _all_ bad. Just like she could not pretend that she was all good. There were no binaries in the world, just vast zones of grey.

So, instead of musing about good and evil while chopping vegetables at work, Sophie allowed her thoughts to drift towards her favourite criminal and wondered if they might at any rate ever become friends.

* * *

The time Sophie had spent with her head buried in the sand ended with a rather harsh life lesson and the conclusion that not picking up on something does not mean that it isn’t happening.

She might have been one of the last citizens to hear about a peculiar red gas that had spread through the streets.

It was a phone call from Gina that would inform her about the ‘Tetch virus’ that had been unleashed in the union station and infected numerous people with a certain type of madness that would differ in almost every case.

Gina said that she had heard it brought out peoples’ darkest sides. Sophie noted that her friend’s voice which was usually relaxed and rather low-pitched was now trembling and had lost its tranquillity. Gina would take a train and leave Gotham as soon as possible - and she offered Sophie to come along to live with her relatives until everything in the city had calmed down.

Sophie had always found fear contagious. If people who mattered to her displayed any sort of uneasiness, she would almost always adapt the feeling. She had thought that this was a matter of empathy, that she was rather sensitive when it came to picking up on other peoples’ emotions.

But now, she felt strangely calm as she listened to Gina’s almost panicked voice. Without a second thought, she turned down her friend’s offer, and told her reassuringly that she would find refuge at her own parents’ place.

She made Gina promise to send her a text once she had gotten out of Gotham safely before she hung up and set her phone down on her kitchen table and contemplated what to do.

Sophie did not want to witness a repetition of what the young man called Jerome Valeska had initiated only a couple of weeks ago. For now, she was fed up with all this insanity, with having to anticipate violence, with being scared. 

Leaving town seemed like a sensible decision.


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie makes a decision.

'What does the woman want?'

Was a question that had been asked by multiple scholars for whom she did not care much. There seemed to be plenty of discourse about what a woman supposedly would or should want.

Sophie knew that society's standards and views were nothing but a fleeting concept, an agenda forever bendable and never static. Yet, she had this idea in her mind, an idea that she might have learned through her upbringing, or through experience other people had shared with her, or maybe it was just something that the media had planted in her brain. But be that as it may, she had a pretty good idea which life choices would be within the broad realm of normality.

For her, it had never been a source for sleepless night if her ideas differed to those of her family and friends to  _some_  extent. What alarmed her was the way the discrepancy between what she thought she  _should_ want and what she  _actually wanted_  had grown ever since she left home.

The spatial distance between her hometown and Gotham seemed to resemble the distance between what she had considered normal back then and what she did now.

If she had told her parents of only one violent incident she had witnessed in this city, they would not have hesitated to turn up at her apartment and pick her up.

* * *

 She could almost imagine her father's fatigued figure standing in her doorway after a god knows how long road trip. Her mind easily pictured how the look in his eyes would get soft and how the corners of them would crinkle as his lips formed the smile that must have been what swiped her mother off her feet all those years ago.

She could almost feel his hug and smell the laundry detergent that clung to every fabric that was washed at home. She would make the two of them a cup of coffee and he would be too nice to remark about how she always bought the cheapest brand the super market had in store.

He would chitchat about his jobs, but mostly about her mother and whatever crafty project she was working on at the moment, with adoration in his eyes and admiration in his voice. While he was talking, she would pack and occasionally roll her eyes at how he tried to explain that building a cupboard was basically rocket science.

After she was done, he would insist to carry her suitcase down the stairs, completely ignoring her protests and rambling about how he should not be lifting heavy things anymore. They would get in the car and she would look out of the window to get a last glance at the gloomy streets, taking in the poverty that evidently clung to too many of the pedestrians, the contrast in which the polished businessman stood to them, the tall buildings, and the noise that she had grown so used to that she wondered if she would ever be able to sleep without it.

Once they were out of the worst of it, they would swap places and she would soon hear her father's gentle snore from the passenger seat as she drove on towards what she had called home for so long.

She would like that. But at the same time, the idea filled her with dread.

She would return to her old life, get back in touch with her old friends from school and college, maybe start dating a few cute guys and eventually end up married, with a house, a garden, and a dog.

It would have been a normal life, a content and happy life – just one phone call away.

But, from the bottom of her heart, Sophie did not want a normal life. And, what scared her, was that she might not even want a happy life. As someone who exhibited the tendency to think in extremes, she wasn't sure if 'normal' simply did not suffice to make her happy – or if being happy was something she somehow did not strive for.

Her life here wasn't normal. Terrible things happened around her every day and every night. And yet, she wasn't an unhappy person- or an overly euphoric one, for that matter. What she wanted wasn't whatever her mind associated with normal, what she wanted was more involvement in terrible things. And one supposedly terrible person in particular.

* * *

 Sophie still vividly remembered the conversation she had with her mother after the blackout, how she had assured her that there had been nothing to worry about.  _No, mum, it was fine! You know how they make everything worse on the news, nothing bad happened in my neighbourhood. I just really wanted to watch this one show on the telly but had to settle for a book instead. That was terrifying._

Despite being a grown up and responsible for her own life now, Sophie just couldn't bring herself to tell her parents the truth. She knew that she was too old to lie to her parent, but she also knew for sure that if they were worried sick about her, she would easily be lured back home, grounded by her own guilty conscience.

While she stared at her phone which still laid on the kitchen table, it dawned to Sophie that she had lied to Gina. She would not call her parents, she would not go home.

Instead, she would stay in her  _new_  home. She had survived the last catastrophe, so why shouldn't she live to see another day during this epidemy?

 _A virus that brings out peoples' darkest sides…_  She had to admit: as frightening as this sounded, the concept intrigued her.

She wondered what the virus would bring out in her, in Gina, in her colleagues, in Victor Zsasz.

_Maybe I'd get so ruthlessly curious that I'd get myself and other people hurt?_

It was hard for her to picture any hidden darkness in her best friend. Gina often seemed like the epitome of kind-heartedness and reason to her. She had this thoroughly positive outlook on the world, always treated everyone she met appreciatively, and usually instinctively knew what would be the most sensitive thing to do in any given situation.

Although Sophie liked to idealize her friends, it wasn't too hard to imagine for her what it would set loose in Victor Zsasz. Not that they were friends, but maybe picturing the effect on Zsasz was easier because she was sure that he already acted out his darkest side. She assumed that the virus might just make it ten times worse.

Perhaps it would make him abandon any code that he seemed to follow and fully immerse into the joy his work brought him. Perhaps it would extinguish all the  _white_  that was mixed into the dark grey of his soul and thus erase the grey area itself. Perhaps it would make a binary system applicable – and it would leave him with nothing as darkness.

The thought scared her.

But what could she do? She didn't know how to reach him, she didn't know where he lived, she couldn't even be sure that he was in Gotham now.

But Sophie realized that even if she had known where to find him, there wasn't really anything she could do. She wasn't equipped for being useful in a situation like this.

She wasn't a brilliant chemist who could mix the antidote out of baking soda and apple juice. She wasn't even in possession of baking soda. She wasn't a super badass heroine skilled in martial arts.

She was one of the civilians more likely to be mugged or killed if she was brave (or dumb) enough to leave the house.

With a sigh, she stood up to once again lock her door and close the curtains before she settled down on her couch and turned on the TV.

It would be good to see what was going on.

* * *

 Things looked worse than she had anticipated. Maybe it was due to the daylight that revealed the extent of the mayhem, but this exceeded the night of the blackout by lengths.

Sophie had to close every window to keep the thick black fog and the loud sound of the sirens and of voices that were either screaming or laughing manically out. But even with her windows shut, she found it hard to breath. At last, she was scared.

She was still so tired from the last traumatizing event, that she did not even want to look outside and see the scale of devastation in front of her doorstep. Instead, she decided to glimpse at today's happenings through the lenses of one of Gotham's news broadcaster.

Her hopes that seeing bad things on TV would somehow make them seem less realistic were disappointed. On camera, it seemed as if every third building in the city was on fire.

The authorities had soon realized that this virus was something the police alone could not contain and even consulted the army.

As a result, heavily armed forces combed through every district and a curfew was imposed. Seeing that those safety measures were taken should have made her feel safe.

But her insides felt raw as she thought about how Gina hadn't texted her yet, how it could be possible that some of her co-workers might not show up at her next shift – that was, if her work place still existed once this was over, and how an infected Victor Zsasz would fully descend into a darkness so deep that she would not be able to see him ever again.

And there was nothing she could do but staying inside and feeling helpless.

Just when she felt closer to crying than she had in years, her phone buzzed.

When she saw that it wasn't a text from Gina, her eyes went wide and once her eyes registered the message's content, the hopelessness in which she had previously planned to immerse into disappeared abruptly.

 _"Are you at home?"_ a number which was saved under the single letter V. inquired.

Under different circumstances, Sophie would have spent more time wondering about how he had managed to put his number into her phone without her noticing. She would think about that later. For now, she felt too relieved to be creeped out or irritated by his audacity.

_"Yes, obeying the curfew like a good citizen. Are you in Gotham?"_

_"Yes"_ It probably would have confused her if he had been someone to send long texts.

" _You're not infected, are you?"_

_"No"_

_"Good."_

While this was far from something that would count as an actual conversation, it was more than enough to lift Sophie's spirits. It would only take one phone call to leave, but, as pathetically as it sounded, one text message was enough to make her want to stay.

* * *

 The virus terrorized the city for less than forty-eight hours.

One sleepless night of waiting for it to stop was followed by a morning that consisted of restlessly pacing through her apartment.

Gina had informed her that she had safely arrived at her uncle's house. Bill from work had called her twice; the first time to see if she was alright, and the second time to tell her that all their other colleagues were fine as well.

Even though Sophie knew that it was for her own safety to stay inside, she still felt imprisoned by her own four walls. While the relief and gratefulness that had flooded through her body when she had heard that everyone she knew was safe and sound was impossible to put into words, it still wasn't enough. She wanted the  _whole_  metropolis to regain its sanity, to go back to its version of normality.

She wondered if the black smoke outside that still consistently rose from far too many buildings would ever stop, if she would ever get to see the city's version of clean air again. If she would ever be able to take a walk outside again and feel the warmth of the sun, and not the heat of burning cars and buildings.

And for once, the universe showed itself to be merciful.

At first, it had started raining. Thick white clouds covered she sky and the rain was coming down in sheets for hours, suffocating most of the flames and leaving a thick white fog in the street that mixed with the smoke.

Then the WNKW news said that an antidote had been released and 90% of the infected had been cured so far. And, for once in a very long time, she felt that everything would be alright – and that was all that she wanted

Soon, Gotham's air was back to its usual unhealthy light grey.

Yet, resisting the urge to open a window felt like a smart idea.

 


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get better.

_What would the tetch-virus have brough out in you?_

_Erm. I’m not sure I know how to answer that.  (Female, age unknown)_

* * *

 Sophie couldn’t help herself, after all, the virus was at least as intriguing as it had been horrendous. But, of course, most of her fellow citizens weren’t as fascinated by the subject as she was, and it admittedly was a very intimate and unnerving question.

After everything the city had suffered, Sophie wondered how quickly Gotham seemed to be getting back on track. The crime statistics beamed in a harsh contrast to the mayhem that had peaked only a couple of months ago. Everything seemed more idyllic than ever and subsequently the paranoia of the citizens decreased.

People on the streets seemed a bit warmer than before, there were less miserable faces and fewer slouched shoulders. The city had licked the worst of its wounds and was on the road of recovery.

And, once again, people had come back from the dead. Sophie wasn’t sure how she felt about seeing Oswald Cobblepot on the front page of her morning newspaper almost every day. Not that she preferred him dead, but to her, the penguin-man somehow felt like bad news. Even if the headlines announced them to be good.

Apparently, the former mayor had decreased the crime rate by more than fifty percent in the course of only three months. And no one really knew just _how_ he had achieved that. It seemed rather peculiar to her.

In Gotham’s official politics, Cobblepot did not appear as an overt participant, but as he claimed responsibility for Gotham’s ‘betterment’, Sophie was sure he must have pulled more than just one string in the background.

Another indicator for this was the way Victor Zsasz behaved. The assassin seemed busier and happier than ever and Sophie hoped that the current version of him she sporadically got to see was the smuggest there was. An enhancement of the complacency he radiated these days frankly would have been too much to bear. To her, the only reasonable explanation for his almost irritatingly good mood was that Cobblepot kept him busy with the kind of work he loved.

Things with the bald hitman had gotten stranger and thus more intriguing after the Tetch virus.

For starters, having his number in her contacts felt exciting, although Sophie would have never dared to initiate any contact and he, of course, never texted her again after that one conversation.   

Instead, he had taken on the habit of arriving unannounced into her flat. Or rather of letting himself in.

Sophie was quite sure that he was doing this for the sole purpose of unnerving her.

Especially since he had also invited himself when she wasn’t home in the beginning. The only things indicating that he had been there were missing food and moved objects.

And since he wouldn’t leave any traces if he didn’t want to, she assumed that psychological terror must have been some kind of sports for him - or at least utterly amusing.

As a response, Sophie made it her mission to seem as unfazed by his intrusion of her apartment and privacy as she could.

The first time she had come home and found that there was already someone in her flat, she had let out an indignant loud gasp and dropped her groceries to the floor with an even louder thump. She would never forget the wide, satisfied grin on his face.

The week after this incident, she would paranoidly shout ‘Hello?’ once she opened the door and then carefully look behind every door and the few corners her apartment had – feeling like an idiot once she realized that her caution had been for naught and that she was alone in her four walls.

The second time, long after she had abandoned the aforementioned ritual for reasons of dignity, she only gave the room a quick scan after coming in and then turned around to get rid of her jacket and shoes. One she had kicked off her boots and turned around, the bald hitman had somehow, seemingly out of nowhere, popped up in her kitchen and was watching her with an expectant grin on his face.

Sophie felt rather pleased for not reacting as dramatically as she had the time before. Instead of doing something that would have fuelled his amusement by large, she merely tensed in shock and felt her heart skip a beat, before she regained her composure and forced herself to look at him with a crooked eyebrow. His grin faltered slightly when she asked him if he had been hiding under the table. Needless to say, it had felt rather satisfying.

The third time, the shock she felt had turned into surprise and was solely indicated by the way her face paled once she became aware of his presence in her apartment. And the time after that, she was able to make sure that her face gave nothing away to indicate this surprise.

Strangely, it felt like having passed a test. Back then, she could have almost sworn to see approval in his eyes for a split second – or at least a slight decline in smugness.

He had always seemed fearless to her, like he was not only invincible, but also fully aware of it. Not being scared by someone who so flagrantly enjoyed inspiring fear in other people felt like an achievement.

In a way, she thought that it made the abyss between them slightly less gigantic. Like she had come one step closer to gaining his respect – given that he was capable of the concept.

Especially, since Victor Zsasz had been starting to give away bits and pieces of information about his everyday life – given that this life consisted of work.

It was on a Tuesday evening that she came back from work, gave her apartment a quick scan, registered that she was alone, and put the kettle on. With a cup of tea in her hand and a tuneless melody on her lips, she made her way to the sofa and stopped abruptly when she saw that it was already occupied by her criminal acquaintance. The assassin was lazily lying on her couch with his arm crossed behind his head, looking like an epitome of relaxedness.

She answered the provocative smile he flashed her with an eyeroll. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

When he nodded without looking at her, she put down her cup in front of him and went off to fetch herself a new one.

With crossed arms, she let herself down opposite of her uninvited guest and allowed herself to scrutinize him. Sophie remembered how she hadn’t dared to look at him when they first met. But by now, it seemed that he didn’t seem to mind. Although she was sure he must have felt her eyes on him, his gaze remained on her ceiling.  

The company of someone who cares so little about politeness enabled her to forget her manners as well. And so she stared shamelessly.

He looked healthier than ever. The dark shadows under his eyes were almost gone, there were no tensed muscles in his face, and he looked genuinely happy, at peace, even.

Sophie was pleased with that, and she thought that it wouldn’t hurt to see if he might be more talkative in this state.

“You seem happy.” She stated. As a response, he just gave her a quick glance with one raised eyebrow before looking back up. Of course, you couldn’t just start a conversation with Victor Zsasz like that. She inwardly rolled her eyes.

“Are things going well at work?” _Ah, that’s it._ One corner of his mouth curled up into a smile.

“Yes.”

“What does Cobblepot have you do?” She still wasn’t sure if he was _really_ working for the former mayor.

“Mh, penguin’s taking control and making some changes in the business. I get to talk to people and convince them of the boss’s plans.” Apparently he was.

He had made a small pause before saying ‘convince’ and during that, Sophie could see how the other corner of his mouth went up into a grin that could be well classified as sadistic.

It didn’t even send a shiver down her spine anymore. Instead, a small smile had spread across her face which, once she became aware of it, disappeared at once.

_It’s just because he looks so happy,_ she tried to reassure herself _, not because of what he says. It’s like feeling sad when you see someone cry. Or happy when you see children playing with their toys. Or breaking them to pi-_ she stopped herself.

“What kind of changes?”

“I can’t tell you the details, but the effects are already visible.”

“Like cutting crime down by half?”

“Exactly.”

“So, it’s some kind of vigilante justice? And you get to carry it out?”

He tore his eyes away from the ceiling and gave her a calculating look.

“You could say that.” He sounded amused. There undeniably was something amusing about a criminal paying another criminal to execute his version of justice.

Just when Sophie thought about what Oswald Cobblepot’s motives may be, he, much to her surprise, filled the silence.

“There are some organized groups who don’t want to follow penguin’s plans.”

He didn’t say it as if it was a problem. He said it as if it was a good thing.

Perhaps it really didn’t matter to him what his employer’s agenda was, as long as he got to do what he apparently loved. Intimidating, threatening or killing those to whom it did matter – and who dared to oppose.

“Today, I paid one of them a visit. A bunch of guys that called themselves Magpies, focused on theft, talked too much…”

It did not go unnoticed by Sophie that he was speaking in past tense.

“They refused penguin’s offer and tried to gather more people, so they had to go.”

While she probably should have been worried about how her guest had killed ‘a bunch’ of people before he came over, Sophie instead tried to fathom what kind of deal Cobblepot had proposed to Gotham’s criminal. It couldn’t be too good if people accepted a visit by Victor Zsasz instead.

It was weird how comfortable she felt despite the topic. Maybe it was because the hitman’s choice of words had been euphemistic. Would she have been more appalled if he had directly said that he had killed several people in cold blood?

She had always known how powerful words were. Many people underestimated what one exhale of breath, two vocal folds and the obstruction of air within the oral cavity could do. Almost everyone articulated sound without even thinking about it. And a lot of people spoke without giving it a second thought. Without seeing the potential of their words and their possible impact.

But for Sophie, language had always been the centre of her universe. Even as a child, she had paid close attention not only to what people said, but also the way they said it. Sometimes, understanding the meaning behind words was like unwrapping a gift, other times, it was like reaching into snake’s pit. Interestingly, both could hide the same message.

Victor Zsasz not voicing out that he was actively committing crimes was something that seemed like an intentional avoidance. Yet, she was certain that this was not for the purpose of sparing her the cruel details. He evidently loved to unsettle people. Not wanting to incriminate himself in front of her also wasn’t really up for discussion since she witnessed him kill people in the past.

And even if someone were to tell the police that Victor Zsasz had killed someone, Sophie highly doubted that this would have given him reason for concern.

_Perhaps that’s it,_ Sophie mused, _it’s an open secret that he is a hitman. He doesn’t need to address it because everyone knows._

The meaning behind his words wasn’t hidden in a wooden chest. It was kept in a transparent box. You didn’t need to open it in order to see.

Yet, this unfortunately wasn’t applicable to much else about him. Even if he could tell her the most gruesome things without really voicing them out, she still couldn’t read him.

But what she could do was listen – and she had always liked stories.

* * *

_Sometimes, Joice would forget to laugh at the appropriate moments and other times, she would have to stifle a laugh because it overcame her in the most inappropriate contexts. It was like she was constantly missing all the cues. At her grandmother’s funeral, one part of her wanted to start crying and never stop until she and world drowned in tears. Another, new part of her wanted to burst out into laughter at how strange the whole procedure was. Her grandmother would be turning in her grave if she had been aware of all the fuss everyone was making about her. It was the image of her sweet old granny rotating inside of the coffin that was just too much. She walked away from all the sad faces, away from all the white flowers, hid behind a tombstone far away and bit into her sleeve to smother her laughter._


	27. Chapter 27

_Do you believe in justice?_

_Yes, I do. My family is rather religious and my brother is a lawyer, so we talk about ethics a lot. I think, in the end we all know what the right thing to do is, and we all have to take responsibility for our own actions. If people cannot find justice in this life, I am pretty sure they will in the next._

* * *

 Gina looked beautiful when she cried.

That was one thought Sophie just couldn’t help thinking. Most people, including herself, looked awful when tears streamed down their flushed face and usually, the knowledge about how their eyes were swollen and their nose was running in an unappealing manner usually made them want to hide their outburst even more. 

Gina, however, was someone who looked graceful when she cried. The tears that were leaving soft trails on her pale cheeks that had only turned slightly pink looked like little pearls, the way she bit her quivering lip looked strangely composed, and the sadness in her gaze was captivating.

Her voice wasn’t high-pitched or hysterical, she just sounded tired, exhausted, and utterly disappointed. After every sentence, she would hesitate and sometimes take a sip of the camomile Sophie had made or simply look out of the window with empty eyes.

At some point, Gina had even smiled at her apologetically and said that she was sorry for turning up on her doorstep in this state. As if she was an inconvenience.

It was heart-breaking to see her friend this distressed. And in lack of a better idea, Sophie had offered her a hug, a cup of tea, a spot on her sofa, and a sympathetic ear. It was all she could do, but it still left her feeling useless and on edge.

Slowly, the words poured out of her friend’s mouth and formed a story that left a lump in Sophie’s throat.

Gina had attended a wedding, something she enjoyed tremendously since it meant seeing people at their happiest, drinking, and dancing. Her friend’s wedding which had been carefully planned for the last year could have been perfect. The room, the band, the cake, the dress; everything had been flawless, and it could have been a magnificent evening if things hadn’t gone so terribly wrong.

 “There were _two_ armed robberies, Sophie. _Two._ The first one was stopped by that criminal, Victor Zsasz. Everyone was so relieved because they thought he was there to save the day. But I remembered that my aunt said that Zsasz had ruined her business, and that there was no way to prosecute these people.”

Sophie could feel that her friend’s despair was starting to mix with anger. Her voice became steadier and the look in her watery eyes fierce.

“You should have seen him. I can’t even describe that man. He didn’t even need to _shout_ or, I don’t know, fire a warning shot or whatever people normally do. He just _whistled,_ and I think these robbers were intimidated by him. He just went up against these four guys by himself and shot their leader’s finger off, as if it was nothing.”

She could far too well picture him doing that. His aim was almost perfect.

“And after they ran off, he congratulated Sonja, the bride, as if this was all just a joke to him. And then the second group with machine guns came and took everything. I know I should be mad at the robbers, but all I can think about is how this psychopath was so happy about ruining a perfect day.”

Strangely, the word ‘psychopath’ stung. The lump in her throat had gotten too hard to swallow.

“He said that criminals need to buy licenses now to commit a crime. This city is going insane. I mean, who in their right mind would ever come up with something like that? There is no way legally regulating crime could ever work.”

_Except it does._ Sophie thought bitterly.

“Thinking that there are people who pay for a lunatic like Zsasz in charge of deciding who can break which law just makes me sick. What if people can also get them for murder?”

It was then that it occurred to her that it wasn’t unlikely that Victor Zsasz actually had a license for murder.

“That would be horrible…” Sophie muttered in agreement before she watched her friend clench her fist and take a deep breath.

“The police will never accept that. Whatever the people who sent Zsasz are trying to establish is never gonna work. They just _cannot_ allow that.”

But Gina did not sound as convinced as Sophie was sure she had hoped to.

* * *

Apparently, the police _could_ allow that.

Oswald Cobblepot had somehow acquired the ownership of _The Sirens_ and announced the beginning of what he liked to call the Pax Penguina to the press. And if comparing himself to Cesar wasn’t megalomaniac enough, he had also put an ice block which contained Edward Nygma in the centre of the room.

At first, she had though that he had put an ice sculpture in the club to give it a flair of decadence. But after she had read the article which said that that the former mayor’s best friend had to be frozen because of a terminal illness, she gave the photograph a second look and saw that it, in fact, contained a human being. A human being that had risen his hands in defeat.

Sophie thought that Oswald Cobblepot was right about one thing. This was a new era in Gotham. And this was a whole new crazy.

_Or perhaps the madness of this city has just finally become institutionalised._  

She had very mixed feelings about this.

_The overall crime rate decreased so much, so there are less people being victimised. This probably results in fewer poor people and fewer small businesses losing everything. Organized criminals would focus on businesses which are economically strong enough to survive theft._

_On the other hand, those robbers had chosen a wedding and not a charity event by Wayne Enterprises._

_Yet, the inhibition threshold for committing a crime is higher. And, ironically, the price for that would be accepting crime. Or at least some crimes._

And this was where Sophie thought it got dangerous. Who oversaw which crimes were worth the peace?

If Oswald Cobblepot, the man whose former chief staff was now trapped in an over dimensional ice cube, was to say which crimes were too horrendous to happen, Sophie thought that the future of Gotham was going to be interesting, to say the least.

But the governing body of her beloved city did not seem to share her concerns. Word on the streets was that Gotham’s executive force had accepted the alternative legislative system.

And soon, just the 15% of criminal activities that happened outside of the licensing system seemingly were the only thing that kept the GCPD occupied.

Never before had Sophie ever wondered if working for the GCPD could be a boring job.

She also wondered if her criminal acquaintance saw the irony in how his work resembled that of a police officer- and if this alternative, _new_ justice system aligned with his codex.

With a sigh, she closed the newspaper and indulged into the weirdly comforting feeling that Victor Zsasz could not be arrested by anyone right now. That he truly _was_ invincible.

* * *

_It felt like a long time ago that Joice would have those nights in which she lay awake in her bed and felt scared of monsters that could have hidden under her bed or ghosts that might just wait until she falls asleep before they make their way through the walls and wind up in her bedroom. Whenever she felt scared, she would pull her blanket all the way up to her skin and stare at the shadows that were dancing through her room with fearful eyes. While she knew that the shadows were caused by the tree in their garden which obstructed the moonlight and whose branches were moved by the wind, she still wistfully thought about how it would have been alright to wake up her parents a few years ago. The last couple of times she had felt that way, she knew that she was far too old for stealing the two of them a precious hour of sleep just so that she could enjoy a glass of hot milk with honey and their reassuring words._

_Now, the shadows that were dancing on her walls weren’t caused by any trees interacting with the moonlight. During the day, the shadows remained inside of her, it was only at night, when she was alone, that they would become visible and detach themselves from her body. Joice wasn’t sure if she was as terrified of her shadows as she had been from those of the tree. But she was sure that a glass of hot milk with honey would not have made any difference._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your lovely reviews! Now I feel even worse for taking this long to update, sorry!


	28. Chapter 28

_When was the last time you were truly afraid?_

_That's a tough question. A couple of nights ago, I was on my way back from a bar and got followed by a guy. He had tried to buy me a drink earlier that night and I had turned him down politely. He didn't seem creepy then, but once I saw that he followed me, I felt really panicky. Fortunately, I could somehow slip into a cab, but the thought that he could have stalked me home still makes me shiver. It scares me how some people just can't accept a 'no' for an answer. (Marjam, 23)_

* * *

Sometimes, Sophie wondered if Gotham's chemists were exclusively mad scientists.

After the Tetch virus, the papers were now talking about a gas which included a fear toxin. Sophie had read a mildly amusing article about how Oswald Cobblepot had been targeted with this gas and was driven into the arms of James Gordon.

James Gordon himself seemed to be a very interesting character, at least in her humble opinion. He seemed to be the only police officer with some kind of work ethics- or at least the only one brave enough to openly oppose Cobblepot's system. She was glad that Victor hadn't killed him all those months ago and hoped that he wouldn't get a similar order anytime soon. It seemed to her that Gotham needed people like Gordon to keep some kind of balance intact.

But what she found more interesting at the moment was the infamous fear toxin.

When she had tried to discuss the article about his employer with the bald assassin a couple of days later, Victor had told her that he had been there and expressed his disappointment for not having killed three men.

While he, of course, had come out of the situation unharmed, Sophie's mind had quickly gone from a brief episode of worry to a rather extensive one of curiosity.

What on earth could Victor Zsasz be scared of?

She looked up from the paper and shot a quick look at the assassin who was sitting on her couch and eating a chocolate bar which she hadn't even known her kitchen possessed.

A split second later, his eyes were on her and he looked at her with a crooked eyebrow as if to ask her what she wanted. Of course, looking at Victor Zsasz wasn't something that could go by unnoticed.

When she ignored his questioning look and continued staring at him, he turned his head back to face the TV.

_Spiders? Nope._

_Snakes? Nah._

_Scorpions? Meh._

_Darkness? Please._

_Death? Fat chance._

_Pain?_ Her mind conjured up the image of the cuts on his shirtless body.  _No._

_Losing someone he loves?_

And once again Sophie felt glad that Victor Zsasz did not care for politeness and wasn't fazed by people staring at him. If he had sent her an irritated glare to make her stop, she was sure he would have noticed her sadness.

Sophie was unable to ban the emotion from her face as she once again contemplated if Victor Zsasz had ever loved someone, if he ever could, and, lastly, if he ever would.

* * *

 

"I might have to kill Sofia Falcone."

Sophie looked up from her document and stared at the man who was sitting on the usual spot of her sofa, which he had once decorated with his blood a lifetime ago.

"What?" Usually, she would have been more eloquent. And by now, she had listened to a fair share of his work stories which would have given most people nightmares, and him stating that he either had or was going to kill someone wasn't anything that could shock her anymore.

Instead, she had been busy writing her novel while he had been busy eating the remains of her lunch. Lately, writing had become easier, the words, sentences and chapters seemed to be pouring out of her effortlessly. It might have been just her imagination but working on her book was so much easier when the bald assassin was around. Whenever she had lost a thought, she only needed to look at him to get at least a dozen new ones.

While she could never forget about his presence in her living room, she had been so absorbed in her chapter that hearing him speak actually made her jump.

She was well aware of the small grin the left corner of his mouth produced for a split second before his facial impression went back to its usual unreadable one.

"Sofia…Falcone?"

Never before had he mentioned killing women. Usually, the criminals who opposed Cobblepot were male. Plus, he had never really told her any names before.  _Interesting._

"Yes."

"Why?"

One thing she really appreciated about Victor Zsasz was that he never seemed to think that she was slow. Or if he did, he simply did not care.

"Orders."

"Oh really, Victor?"

"The boss thinks that she might want to take over Gotham."

"But who is she, exactly?"

"The daughter of the man who used to run Gotham before Penguin."

"Gotham isn't exactly the place for a hereditary monarchy. Seems a bit old-fashioned, don't you think?"

As a response, he just shrugged. But Sophie wasn't willing to let it go so easily. He wouldn't just drop a name if it wasn't important.

"Do you think she wants to take his place then?"

"She says she doesn't. Claims that she wants to become an ally."

This really  _was_  interesting. She somehow doubted that Oswald Cobblepot was someone who enjoyed forming alliances.

"What can she offer him?"

"Her family's name."

"Sounds like they're gonna get married." Sophie scoffed. A marriage to strengthen political influence. That would have been medieval.

"They  _are_  going on dates." He said thoughtfully while a shadow of his usual smirk flickered across his face.

"So, unless she isn't madly in love with him, what does she get out of this?"

"I don't know. I might tell you once he wants me to find out."

She blinked at him several times. Up until this point it had always been her prying information out of him. This was the first time that he had more or less promised that he would tell her something by himself.

Instead of answering, she looked at him with a warm smile to which he crooked his eyebrows, as if he was wondering what was wrong with her.

Maybe she was starting to get to him. Her smile transformed into a smug grin and for once she witnessed how it looked when Victor Zsasz rolled his eyes.

* * *

 

Some more weeks would pass before Sophie found out that Sofia Falcone was one of Gotham's one percent – and a person who liked to invest her wealth into a good cause.

Instead of just making appearances at charity events to show off fancy dresses and to mingle with the high society, Miss Falcone had made the press fall for her head over heels by opening an orphanage.

In the interview with the Gotham Gazette, she presented herself humble and kind-hearted and talked about how she wanted to use her privilege for making the world a better place.

While Sophie would usually have thought that this was too good to be true, the words that this woman used still sounded sincere to her after she had read the article three times. Sofia seemed like a woman that was tired of being linked to her father's sins and wanted to do good where he had done bad.

She liked the idea of an ambitious woman with good intentions and the influence to realise them. Blaming a child for their parents' wrongs wasn't something she considered fair. But if someone in this woman's position wanted to slip into the role of a redeemer, Sophie would be the last person who'd want to stop that. If Sofia teamed up with Oswald Cobblepot, there might be a chance of making this new system tolerable.

And even if the former mayor's paranoia was accurate, and Miss Falcone took his place, it would hardly result in something Sophie would consider a worst-case scenario. In a city like this, a man with Victor's skills would always find a new job.

"You can't kill Sofia Falcone."

She knew that the likeliness of this conversation to be successful wasn't too high, but Sophie thought she at least had to try.

"Oh yeah?"

The hitman, still the embodiment of relaxedness, gave her look that showed a mixture or amusement and bewilderment, before he resumed watching TV. At last, she did mind his lack of etiquette.

"Victor."

"Uh-huh?"

"Can you look at me, please?"

With a swift motion, he switched off the TV, turned towards her and gave her his whole attention. With his head tilted slightly forward and his eyes fixated on her face, Sophie couldn't help but notice the beat her heart skipped.

"Did you know that Sofia Falcone has opened an orphanage?"

"Yes, I've seen it."

_What?_

"You've been there?"

"Yeah. The boss took me along and decided he doesn't want her dead." While Sophie's heart got a little lighter at hearing this, he, of course, seemed genuinely disappointed.

"At least not yet", he added hopefully, "she's one mistake away from being offed."

"Victor. I think Sofia Falcone might actually make a difference in this city. Things could get better in Gotham if someone more humanitarian than Cobblepot had a say in them. I'm not saying that you should let her win if there is any kind of power struggle going on. I'm just saying that she doesn't deserve to die. She could inspire more of the rich people to contribute to a better society."

His facial expression didn't change as he listened patiently to her little speech. Once she was finished, the mild interest that had shown in his eyes before was replaced with boredom.

"I don't care about stuff like that" he shrugged before turning the TV back on again.

Sophie blinked several times before the anger started to make her blood boil.

"Don't you see how many people are suffering in this city? Don't you understand that a person as influential as her can have a huge impact on the overall situation?"

He switched the TV off again.

"No, I totally get that."

"And do you think that one of the few people in Gotham who actually have a good heart and good intentions really deserves to die?"

"I don't care about these things."

"Victor", she felt her voice getting louder, "how can-"

"Sophie." His calm voice cut her off immediately. "I understand your point. I'm doing my job and my job is not to care."

The fire in her veins was replaced by ice and the way his eyes bore into hers sent a shiver down her spine. Before those eyes would devour her, she fixed her gaze on the floor.

"That's not good enough, Victor."

Everyone somewhat  _cared_ , there was not a single person who never felt a twinge of guilt when they saw injustice or a spark of hope that things might change for the better. Everyone had a conscience, why couldn't he?

"There has to be something you care about." She said quietly, her voice less insistent, less convinced than she would have liked it to sound.

Silence answered her and spread throughout the room like a smoke so thick that you could choke on it. With the lump in her throat, it would have been impossible to break it.

"I don't" his emotionless voice replied after an eternity.

Sophie didn't dare to look up, she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing the evidence of her frustration sparkling in her eyes.

With her eyes fixed on her feet, she could feel him silently getting up and leaving. Only when she heard the door click shut behind him, Sophie allowed herself to sit on the warm spot on the sofa where he had been seated only seconds ago and started sobbing uncontrollably.

* * *

 

Some time ago, the rational part of herself would have concluded that never seeing Victor Zsasz again was the best thing she could hope for.

But now, Sophie felt like every part of herself was being torn apart. For the first time since puberty, Sophie had cried for hours and hours, until her head hurt, and she could produce no more tears. She was angry at herself, firstly for being feeling this pathetically devastated, and secondly for pushing Victor Zsasz away.

It had taken so many months to somehow gain a grain of his trust, to establish some kind of strange friendship where he came around and shared some of the things he did every day. Maybe it would have only been a matter of time before he would have started sharing some of the things he thought about every day as well.

And all of this had only happened because she carried this silly, childish idealism in her head and stubbornly insisted on passing it on to everyone else.

The anger remained for several days before it suddenly disappeared all at once and got substituted by sadness and a feeling that came close to homesickness. But although she now felt more alone on her apartment than she had ever been, she knew that this feeling wasn't directed towards her parents' house.

One week passed before Sophie could admit to herself that she missed Victor Zsasz. And not just a little, but a lot.

Ten days passed, and Sophie realised that she was really, royally screwed. Because after ten days of feeling both empty and full of longing, Sophie finally could no longer deny that she was, despite his poor social skills and inclination for murder, in love with Victor Zsasz.

And just like that, she no longer cared about Sofia Falcone's maybe imminent death – just like she had never really truly cared about any other of Victor Zsasz's victims.

What she cared about instead was finding a way to get back to the routine that the two of them had had before. Sophie wondered how she could get the murderer back into her apartment, back to stealing her food, back to rising her electricity bill, and, most importantly, back to talking to her.

It would be two weeks before she started staring at her phone.

* * *

 

 


	29. Chapter 29

Three weeks.

It took her another full seven days, a total of 168 hours, or 10080 minutes to conjure up a plan.

And it wasn't even a brilliant plan. Although some people liked to equate brilliance with simplicity and if she recalled it correctly, one of her favourite teachers had once said that everything was fine as long as it worked.

Three weeks after he had left her flat without another word, Sophie sent Victor Zsasz a text and invited him over for dinner.

And she didn't do so eloquently. In fact, her text had only consisted of the very word, followed by an adverb of time and a question mark.

He liked food, she liked having him around, so asking him if he wanted to come over for dinner seemed like a decent idea.

Sophie had anticipated that he would either take hours to reply or not reply at all. It frankly wouldn't have surprised her if he had not dignified her text with an answer and still turned up on her doorstep the next night.

Instead, her phone buzzed approximately five seconds after she had hit the 'send'-button with her heart beating frantically.

He had agreed.

* * *

It was funny how quickly her anxiety-stricken and hopeless self could turn back into someone who did not only resemble a functioning adult, but also a beaming one.

Sometimes, when you meet the universe with a wide smile on your lips, it shows itself to be kind and generous. Other times, it hits you in the face. To Sophie, whether her day was good or bad usually seemed to be an arbitrary matter. Today, however, she had a good day.

At work, she managed to pry out the recipe for the best pizza she had ever eaten from one of her co-workers. At home, she managed to retrieve her grandmother's recipe for her favourite blueberry muffins. She finished her grocery shopping with lighting speed and was sure that she, although they hadn't exactly appointed a time, was in no need to rush.

Sophie skipped between feeling a thrill of anticipation or nervousness and a somewhat relaxed optimism. She would see Victor Zsasz again tonight, they would probably not talk this out, but she would apologize and tell him that she won't ever try to intervene in his job again – and everything would go back to normal. Well, back to as normal as things could be with Victor Zsasz.

While working in the kitchen of the restaurant, Sophie had somehow forgotten how much fun she used to have working in her own kitchen. Cooking and baking had been something that put her mind at ease when she did it herself and one of her favourite activities with friends.

The smell of food that spread throughout her apartment made her mouth water. It smelled divine and she was sure that he was going to love it.

Outside, Gotham's skyline looked the motive fit for a postcard. The evening sun had almost finished its descend and left the sky in beautiful shades of pink, grey, and blue. Sophie fixed herself a cup of tea and made herself comfortable in front of her window to take in the scenery with a smile on her face as she waited.

In the next few hours, the sky went from the light pastel colours to a darker blue and finally a black that was dark enough to fit her mood.

Only when the clock told her that it was 11PM, Sophie knew that Victor Zsasz wouldn't come.

Maybe he was busy with work. Maybe he had forgotten about the dinner. Or maybe he didn't want to see her again.

She would have loved to believe that there was still a chance that he might turn up in her apartment, perhaps at one or two in the morning, without an apology, to devour the food she had made.

But staying up far beyond her bed time for the small likelihood of this case seemed pathetic to her. She could have texted him again and asked him if he was still planning on coming, but she was both too proud and too insecure for that. She didn't want to seem needy. She didn't want to let him know how much being stood up by him hurt her.

Swallowing down some her pride, she produced a piece of paper and a pen and left him a note to please wake her up next to the food on her kitchen counter before she went to brush her teeth and wash the make-up off her face.

Sophie laid awake until the early morning hours, either restlessly tossing herself around in bed or listening intently for a sound a much-expected nightly visitor would make.

The next day, Sophie fought the urge to throw the untouched food away and instead forced herself to eat one of the muffins. But what had used to be her favourite treat and always brought up memories of a careless childhood now tasted like ashes.

* * *

"You look horrible, Sophie."

Gina's bright green eyes were shadowed by the same concern that had been evident in her voice. While Sophie had definitely lacked the motivation to leave house after being stood up last night, she had also lacked the energy to say 'no' when Gina had insisted that they'd meet for a coffee outside because it would have been a shame to not enjoy the unusual sunny day.

In her current mindset, the beautiful weather seemed to mock her. It would have been more appropriate if the city had been shaded by its usual mixture of grey clouds, fog, and fumes. Instead, the sky had taken on a lovely baby blue and an unfamiliar round, yellow thing had decided to make an appearance in what seemed to be fist time of the year.

"I think I'm having a rough week"  _No, wait, make that three._

"Would you like to talk about it?"

She briefly considered it, she really did, but the echo of her friend's voice, talking about  _the psychopath_  Victor Zsasz was still present in her ears. Even if it would have lifted the rock on her chest to finally share her secret with the person who had undoubtedly become her best friend, Sophie just couldn't bring herself to open her mouth and to formulate the words. It would have felt like betrayal.

They sat in silence for a couple of minutes in which Sophie tried to blink away the tears that were starting to gather in the corner of her eyes and bit her quivering lip. She focused on her breathing and let out a long exhale before slowly shaking her head.

"No, I'm sorry, I can't" she mumbled.

"Don't worry about it, but please know that I'm here if you ever need someone to talk to." Gina said in a tone that sounded like she had just sworn an oath.  _I really shouldn't feel sorry for myself as long as I've got friends like that._

"You know what, let's go for a walk!" And once again, Gina was back to her light-hearted self that Sophie had always found so very contagious. She couldn't help the ghost of a smile appearing on her face.

"So, I was thinking" her friend started with an excited smile on her face "I could show you what I like to do when I'm feeling sad."

And with this, Sophie found herself dragged along into the Narrows to learn that her friend was one of those people who might actually be too good for the world.

"Are you doing this regularly?" Sophie couldn't think of a better thing to ask, still staring at the Soup Kitchen sign.

"Mh, I used to do it more often some time ago. Now, it's only like once or twice a month. It's not as altruistic as it looks. I just find that if you feel helpless, it can be helpful to try and help others."

Strangely, Gina seemed embarrassed. And, even more strangely, Sophie discovered that her friend was right about that last bit.

It wasn't really any different to what Sophie did in her job, it just somehow felt better to chop vegetables and scrub pans without getting paid for it.

Plus, it was nice to have a normal conversation for once. They talked about their jobs, her novel, a guy Gina had a thing for and their families.

Moreover, Gina had been keeping up with the news lately and told Sophie about everything she had been missing for the last couple of weeks. Apparently, she too was very interested in the impact Sofia could have on the city. With awe in her voice, Gina told her that Miss Falcone had gotten injured by a serial killer during a charity event she had hosted because she, heroically, stood up against him. Not only was this woman kind-hearted, she was also brave.

While hearing her friend praising Gotham's new celebrity made Sophie smile since it meant that they both shared the same gut feeling, it also made her flinch. But the feeling of guilt that had sneaked into her consciousness was something she could suppress within a couple of seconds.

_It's not like anyone could stop Victor from doing anything. If he is told to kill Sofia Falcone, he will, there's nothing I can do about it, so why feel bad?_

She barely heard it when Gina told her that many people had stopped volunteering here because the man who had attacked Sofia Falcone broke out of Arkham only several days ago. The former volunteers were scared to return to the soup kitchen because the escapee had killed several homeless people and served them as pie. Their fear of being near people who might be targeted again outweighed their desire to help.

"I feel like it's now more important than ever to not be scared by all the terrible things that are happening. We have to show strength and solidarity, or else awful people like the pyg-guy and Zsasz win."

The notion of Victor's name instantly made her shift her attention back to Gina. For a brief second, Sophie had to fight the urge to tell her that Victor Zsasz did not have an opinion about anyone volunteering to feed homeless people. She doubted that Cobblepot did either, there didn't seem to be any profit that could be harvested from it.

But there was no way she would ever discuss this with her best friend, or anyone else. She forced herself to stop thinking gloomy thoughts about Victor. Instead, she decided to use the quality time with Gina as a welcome distraction and directed the conversation to easier topics.

* * *

22 days.

Sophie was surprised when her favourite criminal let himself in in the evening. If she hadn't felt as horrible as she did, if she had slept well and oozed confidence, she would have mockingly asked him if he had gotten the date wrong.

But now, all she could think of was how tired and sad and unappealing she probably looked and how unprepared she was, both mentally and physically, to face Victor Zsasz. Her train of thought nervously circulated around herself until she finally registered that the figure who opened her door hadn't walked on towards his usual spot on her sofa, but still stood in her hallway, unmoving.

Her heart sank as she took in his appearance. He looked utterly and hopelessly lost. His eyes looked frantic and darker than ever and the contrast to his pale skin was further underlined by the dark rings under his eyes. Apparently, his night had been rougher than hers.

With ease, Sophie recalled how healthy he had looked in those weeks in which he had visited her regularly. How happy and relaxed he had always seemed.

_Something must have happened. He looks like shit._

"Victor?" she asked carefully as she slowly approached him. But the bald man did not reply, in fact, he didn't even look at her.

"Victor?", she tried again in what she hoped to be a sympathetic voice when she stopped in front of him. "What's wrong?" Sophie hated how meek her voice sounded. She would have preferred to sound calm and strong.

But apparently, her tone did not matter. It was as if he hadn't heard her at all and his eyes were seeing right through her.

_Maybe he's ill?_

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, Sophie raised her hand. She didn't dare touching his forehead,  _not when he's conscious_ , but instead reached to gently touch his shoulder.

Once her fingers made contact with the fabric of his vest, he snapped out of whatever had kept him in its grip.

With a motion far too quick for her to grasp, he grabbed both her wrists in an uncomfortably firm grip and suddenly, Sophie found herself slammed against the wall with her wrists pressed against the smooth surface over her head.

The impact didn't hurt her, in fact, she didn't even feel it. What she felt was the way his body pressed against hers, and the way the pressure of his iron grip on her wrists was outdone by the tingling sensation of his skin touching hers.

There wasn't really a coherent thought in her head. Sophie wasn't sure if she was scared shitless or excited. She wasn't sure if he would hurt her or kiss her. Both appeared to be equally likely. What she could tell for sure was that, for once, the hitman had lost his cool.

Being terrified of Victor Zsasz was a sensation she had been glad to slowly overcome in the course of their acquaintance. That she could be pushed back to square one this quickly seemed utterly unfair to her. Yet, fear was not the only thing she felt, fear wasn't even the predominant element in her current state. She felt powerless, at his mercy. And to her surprise, she found that as exciting as unsettling.

With her hypothalamus sending masses of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin through her system, her knees felt weak and her head felt foggy. In what felt like a daze, she fixed her dilated eyes on his.

His eyes disturbed her, the usually cold orbs that sometimes showed a brief twinkle of mischief were now burning with a mixture of pain, rage and madness. Numbly, Sophie registered that she had never seen so many emotions in them. She couldn't remember the last time she had seen something so captivating.

She couldn't look away, couldn't ban the concern out of her mind and eyes. Her racing mind took note of the absence of facial hair, even of eyelashes and how the dark circles under his eyes now seemed worse than ever, almost purple, contrasting with his pale complexion. She felt his odourless, warm breath on her face and, for a split-second, her gaze flickered towards his lips.

Sophie had never been kissed like this before. Victor Zsasz wasn't a gentle kisser and the ferocity with which his lips met hers sent fire through her veins and burnt away every rational thought that her brain might have produced. Butterflies would have been too weak of a metaphor to describe the sensation she felt in her stomach. It was like she melted away, and when her wobbly legs forgot that they were supposed to ensure that she remained on her feet, his rough grip on her wrists ensured that she didn't fall.

The kiss could have lasted seconds or minutes, she had no idea, but she knew that she would have loved it to last forever. She would have loved to wrap her arms around him to pull him even closer, to close any last bit of space that might have remained in between him, to grip his shoulders and feel his muscles under her fingers, to touch every bit of him that she might reach.

And, once he stopped kissing her and she opened her eyes to see that the agony was still as evident on his face as before, Sophie wished that he would let go of her wrists so that she could lock him in her arms and hold him. So that she could provide him any kind of comfort.

"Victor" she whispered, painfully aware of how their faced were still so close that her lips almost brushed against his. And although her whisper had been barely audible, it apparently had been enough to ruin the moment.

Neither being shoved into the wall nor the way he had bruised her wrists hurt Sophie as much as when he let go of her and stepped back. She missed the warmth of his body the second he deprived her of it. Her arms uselessly dropped to her sides and she had to lean against the wall in order to regain her balance.

When he took another step back, she reached out lightly grabbed his lower arm. He looked down on her hand for a couple of seconds and when his gaze fixed back on her face, he seemed more composed. The madness had left his eyes, but there still remained endless depths full of anger and anguish.

Victor Zsasz did not allow her to further drown in his eyes, instead he took a step back so that Sophie's arm remained in the air empty-handedly, touching nothing.

Sophie would have expected him to leave, to flee her apartment without another word, but maybe he had not only registered the concern and sadness in her eyes, but also felt affected by it. Or maybe he hadn't, and she was, as always, inept when it came to reading him or predicting his actions.

Be that as it may, when he said that he had to go it had almost sounded apologetic.


	30. Chapter 30

_It was in autumn that Joice noticed that her friends were avoiding her. Or at least, they had started making plans without here. The inseparable four, which used to consist of David, Lisa, Martin - and Joice, had crossed the odd one out. The quirky quartet had become a tranquil trio. They had grown up quite a bit over the summer and did not bear too much resemblance to the troublemakers the whole neighbourhood had been sighing about for the last couple of years. Joice thought that she had grown up, too. She even had stopped being interested in toys and all the other childish stuff before her friends did, right after she shadow had come into her life. While the thought that the whole situation was unfair crossed her mind, she didn’t really feel upset. She didn’t really mind being alone._

 

* * *

 

When the news speaker on the television said that a man called Carmine Falcone had been killed, Sophie, who had been standing next to her tiny kitchen counter, stopped stirring her coffee and just stared at the breaking news.

 

The universe had decided to serve her some more pieces to a puzzle she would probably never solve for breakfast.

 

Carmine Falcone had been shot by a hitman yesterday afternoon while his daughter, Sofia Falcone, had been injured. Several hours later, Victor Zsasz had shown up at her doorstep and looked severely upset.  _And kissed-_ Sophie dragged that thought aside. 

 

_Did Penguin order Victor to murder the Falcone family because he considers them a threat to his reign? Did Victor mess up the hit on Sofia? Is that why he’s so upset?_

But it seemed unlikely that Victor would manage to take out someone like Carmine Falcone and not succeed at murdering his daughter. Unless…

Sophie barely even dared to think it.

Maybe she had gotten to Victor Zsasz. Maybe he had spared Sofia Falcone because of her little speech. Her little passionate speech. The pathetic one. The one that she had been ashamed of. The one that she had thought ruined everything. 

 

A feeling of warmth started to spread out from her stomach to the rest of her body.

 

Maybe Victor Zsasz did care.

* * *

 

 

Sophie spent the next days like a functional human being.

 

She got up early to watch the morning news, brewed over her cheap filter coffee, took a shower and went to work. Once she got home, she would cook something that might have been food and quickly shovelled it down her throat without really tasting it, so that she could quickly glue her eyes to the news and several newspapers, eager to catch anything related to the former mobster’s murder.

 

Her brain was constantly contemplating Carmine Falcone’s death and she got through the day like someone living underwater- only coming up whenever some of her colleagues would discuss the matter she was so immersed into.

 

At some point, she had absentmindedly found herself in a queue at her regular super market and was only torn out of her dream-like state when the cashier repetitively named she sum she had to pay for her groceries. She didn't even feel embarrassed about testing his and the other customers' patience. 

There were more important things on her mind. 

There was no sign of Victor. No text, no call, no invasion of her apartment and privacy. While she caught herself staring at her phone desperately more than once, Sophie had chosen to ignore all the texts from her family and even Gina. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to deal with any social contacts. And she didn’t even feel bad for not picking up the phone. Especially, since she felt disappointment whenever her phone buzzed and the number on her display wasn’t Victor’s.

 

Of course, she could have gotten in touch. But she _really_ did not want to contact him. Victor Zsasz had kissed her. He might have spared Sofia Falcone because she asked him to. He might find her attractive. He might care for her.

 

Yet, he was Victor Zsasz and with him, Sophie thought, you could never be sure. She felt that walking on eggshells was required to not have him push her out of his life for good. If she didn’t want to spoil it, she would have to wait for him to show up.

 

On the other hand, Sophie hated the idea that the man who had shown up on her doorstep and pushed her against her wall only a couple of nights ago was in emotional pain. Moreover, she had a few ideas what her favourite hitman could do for compensation. And quite of few of them could get him into trouble.

 

Once again, she felt worried and powerless.

 

But this time, she decided that sitting at home and waiting for him would not suffice. Instead, she would actively do something to find out more about what Victor did or didn’t do. The idea of doing some detective work seemed appealing to her. After having read some Arthur Conan Doyle at some point in her life, Sophie had pretty low expectations when it came to her deductive skills. But in a city like Gotham, the chances of overhearing anything about crime were exceptionally high. 

 

And there was a rather obvious place to start in the safety of the public. 

 

Sophie decided to sneak into Carmine Falcone’s funeral.

* * *

 

 

Dressing up for a funeral was, as Sophie ascertained with a sigh of relief, far easier than dressing up for rich people’s parties. Her closet produced a simple black dress, black tights, black shoes and a black blazer within seconds.  _Maybe I should try to buy some clothes that aren't either black or grey in spring,_ Sophie mused. But she would probably never wear them anyway.  _At least I'm always funeral-ready_ , she thought dryly. 

 

Despite the appropriateness of her outfit, she felt a numbing anxiety when she investigated herself in the mirror. Her cheeks were far too pale, and her gaze looked haunted. But while her clothes and faces looked like that of a grieving person, there was no guarantee they would allow her to enter the ceremony.

 

When a person as prominent as the infamous Carmine Falcone was to be buried, there had to be a list to keep peasants like her out. It was highly unlikely that she could just walk in through the front door uninvited without anyone objecting. 

 

She would probably have to find a side entrance or pull off an act and insist that she had been a close friend of Falcone. The sheer thought of it made her nauseous.

 

When she set foot on the cold streets of Gotham on that particularly grim morning, Sophie realised that she wasn’t even sure what she hoped to find out. It was not like she would get a chance to talk to the probably traumatised Sofia and have the chance to ask her insensitive questions about her father’s murderer. If she was really lucky, she might be able to stand within hearing distance of her and get to eavesdrop.

 

Or maybe someone else would mention the name of the bald assassin once the service was over. This was probably more likely to happen and might either provide her some insight into Victor Zsasz’s latest crime or maybe some information about his current whereabouts.

 

But, however it would work out, it was at least something to _do._

* * *

 

 

Once the cab spit her out in front of the cathedral, Sophie was overwhelmed by the breath-taking architecture of the building, and, for one second, her nervousness dissolved. It looked absolutely divine.

 

When she took in the people who were making their way towards the building, her anxiety came back at full force. 

 

The heels of her shoes weren’t even that high, but they still did not help with the fact that her legs felt like jelly and her gate exhibited an elegance comparable to that of a drunken stork. Walking had become strikingly difficult.

 

_What if my dress is too short? Or too long? Do I look too casual? I should have used blush. The women are all wearing make-up and jewellery while I look like as plain as a pillow case. I'm never wearing heels ever again in my life. What am I gonna say if anyone asks me what I’m doing her? This is torture._

By the time Sophie had made her way to the front door on her wobbly legs, she looked like a mess. Her attempts to breathe calmly in order to keep her panic at ease must have sounded like she was on the verge of tears. No one said anything to her when she entered the cathedral without meeting anyone’s eyes. 

 

They had just let her walk through the front door uninvited without asking any questions.

 

Her stress levels decreased significantly and, if she hadn’t walked into a funeral service, Sophie would have smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am incredibly sorry for abandoning this story for such a long time. I have been wanting to get back to it, but I just couldn't find the time. What really got to me was the fact that I still kept on receiving mails about comments that some of you guys wrote although I hadn't posted anything in months. I hope that I can get my mind set back on this story because I would really love to finish it. I am utterly dissatisfied with this chapter, but I am optimistic that I might be more content with the following ones if I manage to retrieve my "flow".   
> I would like to thank all of you who left comments on this story and motivated me to start writing again and the ones who are willing to give reading it another shot.


	31. Chapter 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie goes to a funeral.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy new year, everyone! :)  
> I'm sorry for the long wait and I hope you enjoy reading this chapter

_Joice woke up from a dream. Or maybe it had been a nightmare. She was not so very sure about that. Lately, she was never sure whether or not she dreamed good dreams or bad ones. But it probably did not matter either way. She slowly sat up and looked around her room. She had taken down her posters and pictures, telling her parents that she was too old for them, so that when she looked at the wall with an expressionless face, it seemed to stare back at her with an equally blank look. A tingling feeling on her hand caught her attention. There was a spider on her hand. As Joice regarded the spider with something between mild interest and indifference, it came to her that her dream had been a memory._

* * *

 

It truly was a magnificent cathedral. The sun barely shone through the stained-glass windows and the only light provided came from two rows of lamps that hung from the ceiling. To Sophie, this did not really qualify as light. It looked more like the shadows were less prominent in the light cone instead of gone.

The thing most illuminated within the building was the coffin which contained Carmine Falcone. Two dozen candles were placed next to him and shed light on his mortal remains.

Sophie had never been to funeral and while she had, during her time in Gotham, witnessed people die, looking at a corpse barred up in a wooden coffin was something else. The pale and powdered face of the dead man seemed to be one of the brightest elements in this scenery.

Strangely, Sophie felt drawn towards the body. She wondered if the face of the former mobster looked peaceful, if he looked like someone sleeping or made of wax. Would a smell of decay omit from him? Or did they use chemicals to cover everything up that might be perceived as unpleasant.

She could hear her steps echoing through the building, but no one seemed to notice or mind the sound of the intruder that was walking closer to the front of the building, making her way like a moth to the flame.

Fortunately for her, she was early and there were only few other people gathered around who paid little attention to the woman who was standing in front of the coffin with her eyes fixated on the dead man’s face.

She smelled… nothing, really. There was a faint smell of incense and flowers and maybe some perfume of another attendee. _But nothing rotten._

The figure in the coffin looked as if it did not belong to this world. Or maybe just simply not to this place. His features were so pale that they seemed to have a bewildering glow.

Sophie slowly raised her hand to touch the dead man’s face – and stopped herself. She had done enough to satisfy her curiosity. And she had no idea how much time passed since she had made her way to the front of the building.

Sophie realised that it would be wise to get away from the centre of attention and to turn as invisible as possible. With hung shoulders and her eyes fixated on the floor, she made her way to the back of the church and took place in one of the last rows which were untouched by both the candles’ and the artificial light.

In the safety of the dark, Sophie allowed herself to examine the few people who were present so far.

 _Press_ , she concluded when she saw a young lady in a blouse, blazer, and skirt with a notepad in her hand which did not look too sad in the given circumstances. Instead, the woman chatted happily with a man who clung to his camera as if it was his life.

A priest once came seemingly out of nowhere to relight a candle that had gone out and then disappeared in what must have been a side room.

So far, she did not see anyone suspicious that lived up to her ideas of what a criminal mobster must look like. But, to be fair, her ideas were mostly based on Victor Zsasz.

Along with the number of guests, Sophie’s disappointment grew. There seemed to be nothing but old married couples. And if any of the men in expensive suits were gangsters, the way they snorted into their handkerchiefs must have been the perfect disguise.

When the two men walked by her row, Sophie was so surprised that she almost choked on the yawn she had no longer been able to supress.

What caused many heads to turn after the weird pair was not their difference in height.

Maybe it was the smaller man’s gait which looked as if his ankle had been twisted too far once and then stayed in this position. Maybe it was the fact that he, despite his height and gait, walked down the aisle like he owned the place. Maybe it was the lethal aura of the man who accompanied him. Maybe it was their reputation that induced –

“They say Penguin killed Falcone”, Sophie heard a man seated in front of her whisper far too loudly and with undisguised disgust in his voice.

Or maybe it was the rumours. The rumours that she came for, that she had hoped to hear.

But with the arrival of Victor Zsasz, Sophie had forgotten about her initial quest. Instead of paying further attention to the man who had spoken, her eyes remained fixed on the bald man’s head and followed him throughout the room until he finally sat down, far too much away from her, and her view upon his scalp got covered by the silly hairstyle of some vain woman.

Sophie sighed.

Had Victor Zsasz seen her when he came in? She thought that she had found a great corner for hiding, in the shadow of one of the cathedral’s pillars, but the fact that no one else seemed to have taken notice of her so far did not necessarily mean that the hitman hadn’t either.

Should she try and talk to him after the service? It would be reckless to confront him in the company of the Penguin. But she really wanted him to notice her.

Her attempts of looking through the hairdo of the woman sitting behind Zsasz were stopped when Sofia Falcone was rolled in and captured her attention.

The grieving daughter of the man in the coffin wore a black veil over her face, a black dress which left her pale shoulders uncovered and dark red leather gloves. In Sophie’s esteem, she looked stunning.

A bearded man with a serious look on his face moved the last Falcone’s wheelchair closer to the front of the cathedral and stopped when James Gordon stepped in front of them.

 _When did he get in?_ Sophie felt bad for not being more attentive.

They were too far away for her to make out the words they were saying, and since she could only see the back of Sofia’s head, the one thing she could focus on was Gordon’s face.

In situations like this, Sophie wondered why she had never learned lip reading.

* * *

 

_She was nine and at Lisa’s place. The adults assumed that their daughters were playing with puppets when in fact they were saving the planet from evil aliens who had infiltrated their school and, from their drawings, showed some similarities with their P.E. teacher. And only the town’s best detectives (and their two interns) would be able to uncover the space conspiracy. Joice was rather pleased with the plot and the quality of their drawings. She was rather sure they would become famous once their comic was published. She watched Lisa draw a terrifying alien with a lightsaber. They had wanted to go for laser guns first, but they had turned out to be rather tricky to draw. When she took a pencil to work on her spaceship, Lisa let out a small scream and made her way to the wall faster that it should be possible. It was rather unsettling, but Joice decided to be brave. “What’s wrong?” She looked at her friends trembling lips._

_“Are you hurt?” “There’s a spider.” Joice was not keen on spiders. She did not hate them, and she wouldn’t say that she was scared of them. They just made her feel very uncomfortable. But she decided that she had to be brave for her friend. Slowly, like an animal of prey, she approached the spider and crouched down in front of it. With a trembling hand, she tried to capture the little animal which tried to escape- and crushed it. Joice felt guilt rush through her body and burning on her cheeks. She could almost hear her father say “How people treat animals shows a lot about their true nature. Be careful with people who neglect or harm those weaker than them”_

* * *

 

Once Sophie had given up on her futile attempts on lip reading, she noticed that Victor Zsasz was no longer seated next to the penguin-man. Within seconds, her eyes, which had immediately picked on the task of frantically scanning the room, found the tall figure. He was standing in front of the corps and paying his respects. That was interesting.

First of all, it occurred to her that the simple idea of an assassin at a funeral had something absurd about it. Secondly, she could have sworn that, while his posture was usually admirably upright, his shoulders now hung low. Sophie would have loved to see his face.

From behind, it seemed as if he was fumbling around with his hands. Almost shocked, Sophie imagined that Victor Zsasz might be praying. The idea quickly proved to be as ridiculous as it had sounded. Sophie heard a sound that, ever since she had moved to Gotham, almost became familiar. Victor Zsasz had cocked his gun.

_Is he going to shoot a corpse?_

Fortunately, he didn’t. Although she was quite sure that the press would have enjoyed witnessing that. Sophie could not see what he had done, but there could be a chance that she might do so in the future.

With long strides, Victor Zsasz made his way through the rows of benches, ignoring the penguin-man and passing by Sophie without taking notice of her.

 _He still looks terrible._ Sophie observed when the centre of her attention came into a better view. The dark circles under his eyes indicated that he might not have slept in a very long time.

She looked around to make sure that no one, especially not Oswald Cobblepot, was looking into her direction, and then quickly got up to follow Zsasz.

* * *

 

_Joice gave the spider on her hand another glance, and, when it did not move, slowly got out of bed and made her way to the window. Her hand did not tremble. If she thought about it, she hadn’t trembled for months. Lately, she seemed to be immune to the cold. She opened the window in a swift motion and held her hand out in the cold. The spider still did not move, so Joice decided to wait. After several minutes, she could see a spinning thread reflecting in the moonlight. The spider had decided to leave. Feeling almost pleased, she brushed the thread against the outer façade of her house, closed the window, and went back to bed._

* * *

 

Her shoes were not suitable for running and Sophie was sure that she wasn’t the epitome of gracefulness when she hastened behind her obsession.

“Victor wait!” She shouted and watched the figure in front of her come to a halt. He didn’t turn around until she had caught up with him.

He looked at her expectantly.

Sophie could feel herself blush. She had no idea what to say to him. And it certainly did not help that she was still breathing heavily.

To throw her curiosity into his face seemed rude (which he wouldn’t mind) and insensitive (which he, at some level, could mind).

Instead, she decided to settle for the truth.

“I have decided to come here because I’m worried about you. You seem upset.”

The only comment she received was one crooked eyebrow. The haunted look in his eyes seemed to gain a nuance of irritation. _Great._

“Victor, please?” she tried, not sure what she was asking for.

He looked away.

Maybe because he was annoyed of her and her inclination to show up at places she was not supposed to be. Maybe he was tired of her attempts to get through to him. Maybe her unverbalised begging for his affection finally got on his nerves

Sophie suppressed a sigh.

“There are some things I’ve got to do. I will see you in a couple of days.”

And with that, he turned around and left.

Sophie just stood there and watched his figure disappear into an alley. She felt as if her had was both occupied by racing thoughts and utterly dull nothingness.

When a hand touched her shoulder, she winced in fright and jerked around.

It was Gina, who looked confused, disappointed, and angry.


End file.
